HYBRID CLOUD IS WHERE THE ACTION IS

According to IDC, between 2020 and 2023, organizations’ direct global investment in digital transformation will increase at a compound year-on-year rate of 15.5%. This transformation has been accelerated, as a result of the pandemic, to meet the demands of the market and the citizens and consumers themselves.

Today, companies need a resilient, flexible, and secure infrastructure to manage their operations and transactions while delivering value and new experiences to customers. And this is where the hybrid cloud plays a fundamental role in helping companies of all industries and sizes to achieve the reinvention of their businesses, taking into account 3 pillars:

1. Digital experience. Using cloud-based artificial intelligence in business workflows, such as in customer service, fraud detection, advice, and online sales, will add value to customers digitally and help bring the physical store experience to the online store.

2. Mission-critical workload migration. Previously, the cloud’s focus was on user applications; for example, using the smartphone to check the bank balance. But, these workloads represent only 20% of the total loads. In this new chapter, we will see the movement of the remaining 80% of the loads to the hybrid cloud in multiple environments. Mission-critical loads that customers rely on to run their business and that are very data-rich — business data — will either move to the hybrid cloud or connect to the cloud somehow. This will accelerate new business models as well as increase productivity.

3. Integrate traditional systems with new systems. According to IDC, in Latin America, the trend is that, after COVID-19, 59% of companies invest in hybrid cloud, mainly for mission-critical workloads, while 25% will invest in the cloud private and 16% in the public cloud. Not everything is public. Not everything is on-premise. There is a suitable solution for every business need. The hybrid cloud has 2.5 times more value for companies than a traditional cloud strategy.

The hybrid cloud strategy allows innovation at higher speed, deliver a better experience to customers, enter new business models and jump to new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence to obtain greater insights from customers and the business.

For this reason, companies require a new generation of hardware and software that is smarter, more secure, and specifically designed from the ground up to advanced power workloads in hybrid environments such as AI, Blockchain, and IoT to accelerate innovation.

The foundation of this innovation continues to be its IT infrastructure — scalable and secure servers as well as containerized enterprise storage — which through the hybrid cloud will allow businesses to be smarter in the way they operate; more resilient in responding to changes in the environment, and more flexible in optimizing productivity.

A key finding: Hybrid cloud continues to pioneer as an ideal IT infrastructure model (86% of respondents believe so), and respondents running hybrid environments are more likely to plan to focus on strategic efforts and drive business impact positive.

Key findings from this year’s report include:

• Companies have taken key steps to achieve the IT operating model of their choice global respondents report that they took the initial key steps to successfully run a hybrid environment, including adopting hyper-converged infrastructure in their data centers and dismantling non-cloud-enabled data centers in favor of private data centers and use of the public cloud. Global IT teams are also planning substantial infrastructure changes; forecast, on average, that hybrid cloud deployments will increase by more than 37 percentage points over the next five years, with a corresponding drop of 15% in non-cloud-enabled data centers. In particular, of the many infrastructure categories, respondents reported running a mixed model of private cloud,

• Remote work is here to stay, also companies are making plans: In last year’s survey, about 27% of companies surveyed did not have full-time home workers. That number fell 20 percentage points this year to just 7% as a result of COVID-19. By 2022, respondents predict that an average of 13% of companies will not have full-time remote employees at that time, less than half of what it was a year ago in 2019 before COVID hit. Therefore, improving IT infrastructure (50%) and work-from-home capabilities (47%) have become priorities for the next 12–18 months.

• Strategic business outcomes, not economics, are making changes today: Respondents said their top reasons for modifying their IT infrastructures are to gain greater control of their IT resources (58%), gain the flexibility to meet dynamic business requirements (55%), and improve customer and remote worker support (46%). In contrast, only 27% mentioned cost reduction as an engine.

• Educators face unique challenges and needs related to COVID-19: More respondents from the education industry cited, “ensuring remote workers have the right hardware” as the main challenge. 47% also cited the provision of “adequate communication channels between employees and customers” as the main challenge. The education industry is taking the right steps toward transformation, ranking highly in private cloud deployments, with 29% of respondents saying they only run private clouds (substantially more than the 22% global average).

Today, technology has taken on a whole new meaning. It’s a complex strategy and makes or breaks the long-term viability of a business. COVID-19 has increased into a new era of strategic IT, and raised its profile considerably, and the findings from this year’s Enterprise Cloud Index shows this new reality. The hybrid cloud is a pioneer and will continue to be as we navigate our mix of physical and virtual environments and stop doing business in one way. “