What’s next with multicloud deployments, according to your colleagues

When it comes to IT architecture planning, there’s a lot on the line. Make a few wrong moves (even if they seem right at the time), and you could pay in terms of business flexibility, unnecessarily high operational costs, competitive weakness, or all the above. Make the right moves, and you could become an institutional hero with a license to pursue your wildest IT and vacation dreams… or at least get some recognition and a nice raise. The problem is that with on-premises, hybrid cloud, cloud, and multicloud options, there are many approaches to consider and trade-offs to weigh.

If you’re wondering what your colleagues are doing and how they’re thinking about cloud options, you’re already asking some of the right questions. We’re here with answers.

A recent report from Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), “How Hybrid Cloud Environments Are Changing IT Architecture Priorities,” provides some timely insights. The report, which highlights findings from 350 IT professionals who are part of organizations of 500+ employees, set out to answer the three most urgent questions above (assuming you’re not distracted by a secret vacation-transfiguring project) and more.

It’s old news that cloud migrations can be difficult, costly, and even risky. But given the immense potential of the cloud, that’s not slowing down most IT organizations. A full 97% of organizations reported using infrastructure as a service (IaaS) today, with 80% of them employing multicloud approaches. Some interesting findings from the ESG report include the following:

• Multicloud environments are growing. Of the IaaS users surveyed, 80% already employ multicloud configurations with an average of 2.2 providers. ESG projects that most of those organizations will add another provider in the next 3 years.
• Migration challenges are top of mind. A full 92% of survey respondents are keen to find consolidated and simplified approaches to cloud migration. It’s a top priority along with enabling workload placement flexibility.
• Simplification initiatives and operational cost reductions should go hand in hand. A majority of respondents—59%—are focusing on operational cost savings over the initial capital cost of infrastructure as they seek ways to ease deployment and complexity challenges.

IT organizations widely recognize the potential of and opportunity in hybrid and multicloud architectures. And forward-thinking IT departments know they need to stop treating cloud initiatives as silos and tightly integrate them with everything else. The challenge lies in finding ways to reduce migration-related costs, repatriation-related risks, and the overall operational costs of IT.

NetApp^® can’t transport you to your multiverse vacation. But we can help you get the most out of your storage and cloud environments, starting with dropping some timely facts about what your colleagues are doing in the cloud.

Discover more about “How Hybrid Cloud Environments Are Changing IT Architecture Priorities.”