Struggling to adopt hybrid cloud in the new reality: study

When 88% of organizations faced a shortage of talent that can manage various cloud infrastructures, will post-pandemic digitalization be simple?

Flexibility is crucial to business success. Whether enterprises need to leverage the public cloud to deliver remote desktops quickly, or move workloads to a private cloud to stave off public cloud capacity concerns, or take advantage of on-demand capacity bursting, the current global situation has emphasized the need for an adaptable, future-proof IT infrastructure.

To make its point, one cloud solutions firm conducted a study of 650 IT decision-makers from multiple industries, business sizes and geographies in the Americas; Europe, the Middle East, Africa (EMEA); and Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) regions to analyze key challenges businesses are currently facing when managing both public and private hybrid cloud infrastructures.

• Public cloud revolutionized the IT industry, offering more agility and operational efficiency. And while it is ideal for some applications and workloads, some businesses had specific concerns about running business-critical applications (those most vital to their business) on public cloud. The issues included concerns about reliability (75%), portability (73%), and cost (72%). Also, some firms were unable to move their business-critical applications due to complexity or cost: involving the need to re-architect or re-platform applications (75%) and the complexity of the migration (71%) in porting applications.
  
• IT talent crunch: Many businesses polled were struggling to find enough qualified IT talent, especially for staff that can manage both a public and a private cloud infrastructure. Most respondents (88%) were facing challenges in ensuring their IT staff had the necessary skills to manage a hybrid IT infrastructure, and about half (53%) saw this as a top concern.
  
• Siloing of resources: Given the different skills required to manage public and private cloud infrastructures, nearly all businesses (95%) polled often needed to rely on different teams or siloed workflows for certain tasks. Nearly half of the respondents identified resource sprawl (49%), increased costs (45%), and/or a waste of resources (43%) as concerns.
  
• Licensing and lock-in issues: For most businesses in the study (88%), software licensing was a key aspect of a hybrid IT infrastructure, as many had run into difficulties surrounding licensing (58%) or vendor lock-in (58%) when moving to public cloud. Additionally, nearly two thirds (65%) were willing to consider subscription licensing for their IT infrastructure.

A difficult hybrid situation
The cloud solutions firm that commissioned this small global study, Nutanix, sees that an optimal hybrid cloud environment provides the consistency needed to take advantage of the full flexibility of multiple clouds, whether private or public.

Said the firm’s Vice President, South Asia Pacific, Neville Vincent: “As ASEAN embraces a new business reality, modern organizations are seeking greater flexibility and looking to decentralize resources to make them more readily available. The use of multiple clouds (public, private or at the edge) allows businesses to bring their IT infrastructure where it is most needed. The research shows that flexibility will remain a critical consideration, and one that can only be achieved through consistent constructs, operations and tools. Hybrid cloud is the ideal choice for this journey. Not only does it address immediate business requirements, it also enables and empowers organizations to prepare for a multi-cloud future.”

Nevertheless, while most respondents (95%) in the study saw hybrid cloud as the ideal IT model, many (70%) were struggling to adopt it, believing that their transformation was taking longer than expected.