The Flexential Hybrid IT Study
Hybrid IT is not a new concept, but in the age of digital transformation, its incentives for implementation should be clear.
Workloads are larger and more demanding, and IT environments and infrastructure of all kinds are growing as a result. Some businesses believe they need to keep more workloads on-premise due to security and compliance constraints or latency and network capacity demands; others will place greater emphasis on the cloud for software as a service use cases. Colocation is preferred when support needs are high. There is justifiable logic for any configuration of hybrid IT, and every business’ needs are different — it is critical to respect this dynamic as technology adoption continues to rapidly evolve.
Hybrid information technology is an “I choose this” story. A prevailing assumption among many professionals throughout the IT industry is that “hybrid” is a word to describe a transitional state — organizations are on a journey to the cloud, and eventually, 100% of their systems will live there. This hypothesis does not align with what the data tells us: organizations choose hybrid IT because it makes business sense. Hybrid IT workloads, reasons businesses use them, future hybrid plans and cost savings data are analyzed in The Flexential hybrid IT study: a solid business case for mixed infrastructure.
The two-phase study included an online survey of 212 IT decision makers from a variety of industries, as well as indepth, qualitative phone interviews with IT decision makers focused on defining hybrid IT, reasons to remain on premise versus cloud or colocation, common technology challenges creating the need for a hybrid strategy and future plans.