IT Pros should Focus on Information – hybrid cloud

Veritas Technologies, announced the results of a global survey indicating that nearly three-quarters of enterprises continue to adopt multiple private and public cloud strategies. The findings highlight the need for organizations to adopt solid information management and security strategies.

The study, commissioned by Veritas and conducted by Cicero Group, surveyed 1,800 global IT decision makers in organizations with at least 500+ employees and at least 75TB of data under management. Overall, the research revealed that business-critical workloads in the public cloud are set to double in the next 24 months – roughly the same rate as non-critical workloads – putting pressure on IT departments to ensure their entire business services, not just their infrastructure, are highly available and secure.

The study examined both the rate at which organizations are moving data to the cloud, utilizing both private and public cloud services, as well as the reasoning behind their decisions. The research also appears to disprove some common perceptions about cloud adoption. For example, one traditional view is that less important workloads will migrate to the public cloud first and at a faster rate. While this may have been the case early on, the study found that this is shifting: business-critical workloads including CRM and ERP are moving to the cloud at the same rates statistically – from 25-30 percent -- as other, less critical workloads. While these findings indicate an increased trust in moving data of all types to the cloud, it also translates to added pressure for service providers to ensure high availability and avoid downtime, as well as challenges IT departments to have the right data protection strategies in place that can spend heterogeneous infrastructure – on and off premise.

Key findings of the study include the following:

• 38 percent of workloads exist in a private cloud, with 28% in a public cloud. However, these numbers are expected to grow at rates of 7% and 18%, respectively, over the next twelve months.
•  74% percent of enterprises are currently leveraging two or more cloud infrastructure vendors to support their workload requirements and 23% are using four or more vendors. This means that the burden of protecting, managing and utilizing the data across these heterogeneous environments will fall largely on IT departments.
• - Geographically, Japan and Brazil lead the way in leveraging the public cloud with roughly 50% more workloads moving to the public cloud than the U.S., Canada, France and Germany.
•  When examined by industry, manufacturing led the way in migration to the public cloud with 30% of their workloads in the public cloud, as compared to 24 percent in telecommunications, 23 percent in both healthcare and financial and 16% in the public sector.
•  More than one-third of respondents reported that cost is the primary driver for moving to the public cloud, while the top inhibitor to public cloud use remains security, with 50% reporting that security/protection architectures is still the top reason for avoiding the public cloud. Interestingly, of those who have adopted public cloud, security was the top driver of satisfaction with their decision, highlighting, perhaps, that public cloud vendors need to better articulate and promote their security capabilities and successes.
• A sizeable number of respondents noted that certain workloads would always remain on-premises rather than migrating to the cloud. For example, 28% state that backup and recovery will remain on-premises, 27% will keep disaster recovery out of the cloud and 26% will continue to house archive, data warehousing and relational or OLTP databases on-premises.
• 81 percent of enterprises rely on service providers for help with cloud implementation, as well as ongoing operations, indicating that the heterogeneous and “messy” nature of cloud will continue to be a challenge for IT departments, and service providers with high levels of support and skills will be invaluable to organizations, particularly as they migrate workloads to the public cloud.