Over 50 per cent of Australian organisations have now adopted what they consider to be a hybrid cloud strategy, according to a new study by IDC, and almost 80 per cent plan to move this way in the future.
The survey did uncover some confusion about exactly what constitutes a hybrid cloud strategy – some organisations understand hybrid clouds to be a service delivery architecture, while others consider them to be product-focused infrastructure implementations.
“The range of solutions and services available that interconnect private and public clouds as well as bridging between multiple public clouds has enabled enterprises to adopt solutions based on hybrid cloud architectures. The increased adoption of hybrid cloud to facilitate enterprises’ digital transformation agenda will further positively impact the growth of cloud services in Australia,” said Prabhitha Dcruz, senior market analyst, IDC Australia.
Currently 67 per cent of organisations surveyed use public or private cloud for more than one or two small applications or workloads, yet only 13 per cent of the respondents believed they have an “optimised” cloud strategy.
When it comes to the drivers for cloud adoption, cloud is viewed as a means to reduce IT budgets, with this reason remaining in the top three drivers – reflecting the “lower maturity levels of many organisations”, according to IDC.
Public cloud spending is also expected to be essentially flat over the next two years, with most of the growth expected to come from hosted private cloud adoption, both in on demand and dedicated hosted private cloud.
“The challenge for many CIOs as they begin hybrid cloud implementations is experience and skills. Hybrid clouds require expertise that is low in availability and the smart CIO decides on an experienced implementation partner at the beginning of their project. Working with a partner at early stages of a project to plan the implementation can minimise risks of project budget and timeline overruns,” said Chris Morris, VP for cloud services research, IDC.
