Successful Hybrid Clouds Depend on Collaborative Business and IT Management

Document #251874 © 2014 IDC. www.idc.com | Page 1

IDC White Paper | Successful Hybrid Clouds Depend on Collaborative Business and IT Management

IDC OPINION

IDC’s research shows that business, government, and nonprofit organizations around the

world are rapidly implementing hybrid cloud architectures to improve service levels and

business agility. The results of a recent worldwide IDC survey (Hybrid Cloud Survey) of 711

business and IT decision makers, sponsored by VMware, show how successful adoption of

hybrid cloud strategies can dramatically increase business value — if bolstered with new,

more collaborative business and IT decision making and governance approaches. Specifically:

» 64% of participants identify their current or planned cloud strategy as hybrid cloud.

» 70% of participants believe hybrid cloud is very important or critical to the success of their

business.

» 54% of hybrid cloud adopters believe the majority of their future revenue and business

growth will be tied to hybrid cloud.

» Integration with non-cloud resources and improved business and IT coordination is most

often identified as being critical to successful execution of hybrid cloud strategies.

» Business and IT teams will increasingly collaborate on making critical decisions about

cloud strategies, public cloud service selection, standards, SLAs, and end-user support.

In This White PaperThis white paper discusses the results of a worldwide Web-based survey conducted by IDC

during June 2014. The survey was sponsored by VMware. The 711 participants were selected

for their knowledge of their organization’s current and planned cloud strategies.

Successful Hybrid Clouds Depend on Collaborative Business and IT Management

Sponsored by: VMware

Author: Mary Johnston Turner

October 2014

Highlights64% of participants identify their current or planned cloud strategy as hybrid cloud

70% of participants believe hybrid cloud is very important or critical to the success of their business

54% of hybrid cloud adopters believe the majority of their future revenue and business growth will be tied to hybrid cloud



n = 711 Base = all respondents

Notes: This survey was managed by IDC’s Quantitative

Research Group. Data is not weighted.

Multiple responses were allowed. Use caution when interpreting small sample sizes.

Source: IDC’s Hybrid Cloud Survey, June 2014

Participants represented a mix of business (40%) and IT (60%) decision makers from a wide

range of industries, company sizes, and geographies. This survey was designed to better

understand the impact of hybrid cloud strategies on business performance, decision making,

and agility. All participants represented organizations that currently use or plan to use one

or more cloud resources, including on-premise and/or hosted private cloud; public SaaS,

public IaaS, and public PaaS; and virtual private cloud services. Participants with no current or

planned use of any type of cloud capability were excluded from this survey.

Situation OverviewHybrid Cloud Strategies Dominate Enterprise IT Sourcing Plans

IDC’s research shows that hybrid cloud architectures are widespread today and will exist well

into the future as IT and business decision makers proactively match business application and

workload requirements to an ever-increasing array of IT sourcing and management models.

As Figure 1 shows, worldwide, the majority of survey participants currently rely on traditional

in-house IT, virtual servers, hosted and/or on-premise private clouds, and a range of public

cloud offerings. Virtual private cloud and hosted/managed private cloud services are the most

frequently mentioned strategies overall for the next 12–36 months.

FIGURE 1

Current and Future Worldwide IT Sourcing and Management Models

5445

3934

3129

231514

1210

Traditional in-house IT

Hosted/managed private cloud

Virtual private cloud

Tradational hosted, colocation, or outsourced IT

Virtual servers

Public cloud services

On-premise private cloud

Multi-tenant public cloud

Non-virtualized infrastructure

Dedicated public cloud

Platform as a service

(% of respondents)

Current

4543

3735

2928

2216

1414

12

Virtual private cloud

Hosted/managed private cloud

Traditional in-house IT

Tradational hosted, colocation, or outsourced IT

Public cloud services

Virtual servers

On-premise private cloud

Dedicated public cloud

Non-virtualized infrastructure

Multi-tenant public cloud

Platform as a service

(% of respondents)

Future

Q. Current: Thinking about your organization’s overall IT environment, please indicate which types of IT sourcing and management models you have in place today.

Q. Future: Please indicate which types of IT sourcing and management models you expect to have implemented within your organization over the next 12–36 months.



Many organizations are beginning to refer to this new environment as a hybrid cloud.

Many organizations are still struggling with how to best describe this shift to mixed

IT sourcing and management models. Most decision makers recognize that they are

experiencing a number of critical changes in terms of IT architectures and management,

including:

» Migration from physical to virtual and software-defined infrastructure

» Adoption of policy-driven approaches to management and allocation of resources

» Replacement of fragmented, proprietary, device-specific management platforms with

standards-based unified approaches to provision, configure, monitor, and optimize the

use of on-premise infrastructure, dedicated managed services, and shared public cloud

services

» Replacement of IT-centric decision-making processes with collaborative, business-led

approaches to cloud solution selection, operational governance, and day-to-day end-user

empowerment

Many organizations are beginning to refer to this new environment as a hybrid cloud. Survey

participants held a variety of opinions when it came to providing a detailed definition of

hybrid cloud. As Figure 2 shows:

» 38% define hybrid cloud as “an IT environment that uses a mix of public cloud services and

dedicated IT assets, including virtualization and private cloud.”

» 23% define hybrid cloud as “a composition of two or more distinct cloud infrastructures

(private or public) that remain unique entities but are bound together by standardized or

proprietary technology that enables data and application portability (e.g., cloud bursting

for load balancing between clouds).

» Others define hybrid cloud as “subscription to multiple cloud services from different cloud

service providers for different business needs” (11%) or “a datacenter environment that

supports multiple vendors’ hypervisors” (11%). There was little variation across regions

indicating worldwide IT and line-of-business decision makers have varied ideas about

what the term hybrid cloud means specifically.



14%22%

64%

Yes No Unsure

FIGURE 2

Definitions of Hybrid Cloud Vary Q. What does the term “hybrid cloud” mean to you?

n = 711

Base = all respondents


Regardless of the detailed definition, IT and line-of-business decision makers recognize that

this move to software-controlled IT environments — dynamically managed using business

policies and automation — represents a fundamentally new way of procuring, delivering,

and operating IT. In fact, 64% of survey participants define their cloud strategy as hybrid (see

Figure 3).

FIGURE 3

Use of Hybrid Cloud

Q. Would you describe your organization’s current or planned cloud strategy as hybrid cloud?

n = 711


Notes:

This survey was managed by IDC’s Quantitative Research Group.

Data is not weighted.

Multiple responses were allowed.

Use caution when interpreting small sample sizes.


38

23

11

11

8

Mix of public cloud services and dedicated IT assets

A composition of two or more distinct cloud infrastructures

Datacenter supports multiple hypervisor worlds

Subscription to multiple cloud services

Workloads are highly portable and automatically burst/load balance across public/private clouds

Manage all IT resources using same service catalog, SLAs, etc.

(% of respondents)

5



Regional Priorities for Hybrid CloudDecision makers in the United States (71%) are most likely to describe their cloud strategies as hybrid, although almost

two-thirds (63%) of decision makers in EMEA and Asia also describe their organization’s approach to cloud as hybrid.

FIGURE A

Hybrid Cloud Strategies by RegionQ. Would you describe your organization’s current or planned cloud strategy as hybrid cloud?



A look at the mix of public and private cloud options in use and under consideration today to support strategic

business initiatives shows that organizations in the United States are ahead of organizations in Asia and EMEA in

considering public cloud options, with 70% of United States–based survey participants stating their organization is

currently using or considering using SaaS and IaaS and 63% using or considering PaaS. The majority of organizations

based in Asia are using or considering SaaS (60%), IaaS (59%), and PaaS (52%), while EMEA lags behind slightly with just

about half of organizations considering these different public cloud options. Organizations in EMEA are slightly more

likely to be using or considering some type of private cloud than their counterparts in the United States or Asia.

FIGURE B

Cloud Consideration by RegionQ. What type of cloud services or resources is your organization currently using or considering using to support your organization’s strategic business initiatives?



63

63

71

Asia (n=230)

EMEA (n=354)

United States (n=127)

(% of respondents describing cloud strategy as hybrid)

(% of respondents)

6050

70

5250

63

5954

70

3542

39

Public cloud SaaS

Public cloud IaaS

Public cloud PaaS

Private cloud

Asia (n=230)EMEA (n=354)United States (n=127)



Regardless of whether an organization describes its cloud strategy as hybrid, participants

recognize the strategic role cloud can play in enabling a new generation of dynamic, agile

business applications. Most participants expect to run a wide range of workloads and

applications across their cloud environments over the next several years. As Figure 4 shows,

big data and analytics are most often identified as workloads for which cloud is highly

strategic. Big data and analytics workloads frequently require access to large-scale computing

and storage resources and can benefit directly from the ability to make variable levels of

resources available on demand. All regions agree on this priority.

Other applications frequently seen benefiting from cloud include ecommerce, collaboration,

and end-user productivity applications such as email, on-demand compute and storage, and

VDI. These types of applications are frequently enabled via public cloud services or hybrid

n-tier architectures that rely on traditional back-end on-premise technologies but deploy

Web front-end services into public clouds to support a wide range of traditional and mobile

users. Decision makers in the United States were more likely to see cloud as strategic to

their ecommerce solutions, while participants in EMEA were more likely to call out mobile

applications and VDI. Participants based in Asia indicated that cloud was very strategic for

collaboration and personal productivity workloads.

FIGURE 4

Top 10 Strategic Cloud Workloads

Q. For which workloads is your organization’s cloud approach considered most strategic?

n = 711


Notes:






44363636

3535

3433

3231

Big data and analytics

E-commerce/customer/partner services

Collaboration/end-user productivity

On-demand compute and storage

Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)

Logistics/inventory/supply chain management

Mobile application and device managment

New cloud-enabled revenue-generating services

Content serving and archiving

Development and testing

(% of respondents)



Significant Business Benefits Expected from Hybrid Cloud

Even more importantly, worldwide decision makers recognize the benefits that can result

from the use of a hybrid cloud strategy. Among decision makers that define their current or

planned cloud strategy as hybrid cloud, approximately half (52%) state that having control

over critical assets and information combined with agility from public cloud is a top benefit

of a hybrid strategy. The other major benefits include optimized cost and performance (46%),

consistent end-user experience using common self-service portals and automation (45%),

and business agility and differentiation (45%) (see Figure 5).

FIGURE 5

Benefits Expected from Hybrid Cloud Q. What benefits do you expect your organization to get from adopting a hybrid cloud strategy?

n = 456

Base = respondents who define current or planned cloud strategy as hybrid

Notes:






Investments in hybrid cloud solutions are expected to pay off over the long run. Both IT

and line-of-business decision makers recognize that the transition to hybrid cloud will have

long-term impacts on their organization’s ability to compete in global markets. In fact, 70%

believe hybrid cloud will be critical or very important to helping their organization achieve its

business goals and compete effectively in 2020 (see Figure 6). Sentiments on this topic were

very consistent globally.

52

46

46

46

30

25

8

Control over critical assets and information combined with public cloud agility

Optimized cost and performance

Consistent end-user experience via self-service portal and automation

Business agility and differentiation

Business continuity/DR

Best leverage of in-house IT skills

Avoid vendor lock-in/flexibility to migrate workloads as needed

(% of respondents)



A Regional View of Hybrid Cloud BenefitsA look at the regional breakout of expected benefits shows that participants based in the United States feel particularly

strongly about benefits related to being able to balance control of critical assets with agility benefits from public cloud.

They also expect to see benefits associated with their ability to improve overall business agility and differentiation.

Decision makers in Asia tend to most strongly associate the benefits of hybrid cloud with balancing control and

public cloud agility, providing consistent end-user self-service experiences, and optimizing cost and performance.

Organizations in EMEA place almost equal priority on balancing control with public cloud agility, business agility and

differentiation, user experience, and optimized cost and performance.

FIGURE C

Expected Hybrid Cloud Benefits by Region Q. What benefits do you expect your organization to get from adopting a hybrid cloud strategy?

Base = respondents who define current or planned cloud strategy as hybrid


(% of respondents)

5147

64

494444

172929

3545

63

2131

40

4945

43

89

4


Control over critical assets and information combined with public cloud agility

Business agility and differentiation

Consistent end-user experience via self-service portal and automation

Optimized cost and performance

Business continuity/DR

Best leverage of in-house IT skills

Avoid vendor lock-in/flexibility to migrate workloads as needed



Most survey participants expect that cloud investments will directly impact future business

growth and revenue (see Figure 7). This is true among both IT and line-of-business decision

makers across all regions.

FIGURE 6

Level of Importance of Hybrid Cloud for Business Success over the Long TermQ. On a scale of 1 to 5, how important will a hybrid cloud environment be in helping your organization achieve its business goals and compete effectively in 2020?

FIGURE 7

Impact of Cloud on Future Revenue and Business GrowthQ. How much of your organization’s future revenue and business growth will be tied to cloud?

n = 711


Notes:

This survey was managed by IDC’s Quantitative

Research Group.



Data is measured on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 =

“not at all important” and 5 = “critical.”


n = 711


Notes:

This survey was managed by IDC’s

Quantitative Research Group.


Use caution when interpreting small

sample sizes.

Source: IDC’s Hybrid Cloud Survey,

June 2014

2

6

18

24

28

Under 10%

10–19%

20–39%

40–59%

60–79%

80–99%

100%

(% of respondents)

(% o

f fu

ture

rev

enue

and

bus

ines

s g

row

th r

elat

ed t

o c

loud

)

13

8

30%

70%

Less important Critical/very important



Future OutlookNew Roles Emerge for Central IT Teams

Hybrid cloud environments change the status quo in terms of how IT resources are sourced and

managed. They also require new approaches to the way organizations make decisions about a

number of important factors, including:

» Governance for defining SLAs and configuration standards for mission-critical workloads

» Priorities for end-user support, flexibility, mobility, and self-service

» Guidelines for selecting and monitoring public cloud services

» Decision making about where to deploy workloads across public, private, or non-cloud IT

resources

» Security and compliance requirements

Organizations committed to hybrid cloud strategies are more than twice as likely (57%) as

organizations that do not have a hybrid cloud strategy (22%) to report IT does very well in

meeting the needs of the business. These organizations have recognized that the rate of change

facing IT cannot be handled using traditional fragmented manual processes. Rather, they have

invested time and effort in finding new ways to collaborate across business and IT teams to

better align decisions about IT spending and priorities (see Figure 8).

FIGURE 8

Role of Hybrid Cloud in Aligning Business and IT Priorities

Q. How well does your central/corporate IT organization currently meet the needs of the business?

n = 711


Notes:

This survey was managed by IDC’s Quantitative

Research Group.




Hybrid cloud (n=456)

Non-hybrid (n=255)

Very well Adequately Poorly Unsure

57

22

39

70

4

7

(% of respondents)



As the scale and complexity of hybrid cloud environments expand, many organizations are

starting to recognize that there is value in a collaborative approach that allows business

decision makers to focus on day-to-day business issues and offloads the need for them to

evaluate, monitor, and police cloud service offerings coming from a wide variety of third-

party vendors. While individual line-of-business teams benefited from near-instant access

to early cloud services for the needs of development and test and individual project teams,

many businesses have found it difficult to manage these service provider relationships as they

proliferate.

As Figure 9 shows, IT and line-of-business decision makers agree that over the long term,

one of the most strategic roles for central IT organizations will be managing the selection

and quality of public cloud services (52%). Other important roles for central IT are expected

to include optimizing IT spend and chargeback across all cloud and non-cloud resources

(49%) and maintaining central application dev/test/QA resources (45%) regardless of whether

they are enabled in-house or via a public cloud service. Regardless of geographic region,

participants agreed on these priorities.

FIGURE 9

Most Important Roles for Central IT by 2020

Q. What do you see as the most important role(s) for the central IT organization by 2020?

n = 711


Notes:






5249

4543

4240

3830

26

Manage selection and quality of public cloud services

Optimize all IT spend and chargeback as appropriate

Maintain central app dev/test/QA

Enable seamless self-service across all internal and external IT

Manage end-user devices and apps

Internal provider of IT infrastructure to BUs

Day-to-day operation of external revenue-generating online services

Help business use new technology to innovate

Protect sensitive data/manage business risk

(% of respondents)



New Governance, Process, and Enabling Technology Priorities Appear

The ability of an organization to benefit from the business agility enabled by cloud, and to achieve

business and IT goals, frequently depends as much on process and governance as it does on

investment in the state of the enabling technologies. When asked to consider factors that might

be hampering their ability to execute their cloud strategies successfully, survey participants

agreed that they need better integration across cloud and non-cloud resources (43%) and better

coordination between business and IT stakeholders (41%). There was little geographical variation

in these priorities (see Figure 10).

FIGURE 10

Most Important Roles for Central IT by 2020

Q. Which of the following areas of your organization’s overall cloud strategy need the most improvement?

The shift from managing technology based on the health of individual devices and components

to managing technology based on end-to-end service levels and SLAs is fundamental to hybrid

cloud strategies. As business needs shift and workload requirements vary unpredictably, IT

organizations will make greater use of automated self-service provisioning, dynamic capacity

analysis, and active workload migration technologies to optimize the consumption of resources

and the costs incurred. The ability to make changes rapidly requires that business and IT

teams have agreed on security and access policies, configuration standards, and end-to-end

performance SLAs. Automation, orchestration, and integrated software-defined datacenter

management solutions will be needed to execute cloud strategies on demand.

n = 711


Notes:






sample sizes.


June 2014

4341

383635

322222

22

22

Integration with non-cloud resources

Coordination between business and IT

User security and access control

Connection to existing data/datacenters

Use of automation and self-service

Confidential data and IP protection

Use of chargeback/showback

Business case justification

Alignment on standards, configurations, SLAs, and data models

Ability to determine which workloads are best served by which types of clouds

(% of respondents)



As Figure 11 shows, survey participants rank security and compliance processes (54%) as the

most critical enabler of their cloud strategies. The ability to monitor and enforce standard

SLAs and end-user experiences (40%) and the deployment of software-defined datacenter

technology and automation (37%) are also frequently identified as critical enabling processes

and technologies for cloud strategies. Organizations with commitments to hybrid cloud rated

software-defined datacenter technologies more highly than those without hybrid cloud

commitments.

FIGURE 11

Critical Cloud Enablers over the Next Five YearsQ. Which of the following technologies and processes are most critical to the successful execution of your organization’s cloud strategy over the next five years?

Organizations that are committed to hybrid cloud are frequently ahead of the curve in

refining and adapting their security strategies. This is likely because they have a deeper

understanding of the role policies and automation play in enabling effective cloud operations.

As an example, in Figure 12, organizations with a commitment to hybrid cloud were

more likely to say they had made significant changes to the way they manage their cloud

infrastructure in the wake of large-scale and highly public security incidents such as the Target

data breach. United States–based participants were the most likely to say they were doing

things extremely differently.

n = 711


Notes:






sample sizes.


June 2014

54

40

37

37

32

32

30

Security and compliance processes

Ability to monitor and enforce standard SLAs and end-user experience

Software-defined datacenter technology/automation

Application programming interfaces (APIs)

Unified services catalog for end-user self-service

Automation

Development and operations (DevOps)

(% of respondents)



A Regional View of Critical Hybrid Cloud EnablersAll regions agreed on security and compliance processes as the top enabler of their hybrid cloud strategies. Participants

based in the United States and Asia felt more strongly about the ability to monitor SLAs and the value of software-

defined datacenter technology and automation than did their counterparts in EMEA. Organizations in EMEA tend to

see networking and general automation as more important.

FIGURE D

Regional View of Top Cloud Enablers over the Next Five YearsQ. Which of the following technologies and processes are most critical to the successful execution of your organization’s cloud strategy over the next five years?




(% of respondents)

3329

37

5551

59

2338

35

4031

46

322829

393536

4236

48

2337

32

2031

33

2321

24

Security and compliance processes

Ability to monitor and enforce standard SLAs

Software-defined datacenter technology

Unified service catalog for self-service provisioning

Application programming interfaces (APIs)

Networking

Storage

Automation

Development and operations (DevOps)

Open source



FIGURE 12

Hybrid Cloud Users React Rapidly to Security ConcernsQ. In the wake of incidents such as the Target data security breach and the Snowden infiltration of government information systems, how differently are you managing your cloud infrastructure to satisfy business and IT requirements?


Notes:





The Hybrid Cloud Imperative: Collaborative Business And It OperationsHybrid cloud environments will enable much more flexible, agile, and cost-effective IT

operations than traditional IT architectures. They will allow organizations of all sizes to quickly

scale resources and access new capabilities as needed. However, the success of this new

approach to computing demands a new approach to making decisions about technologies,

services providers, and day-to-day user support priorities.

IDC’s Hybrid Cloud Survey shows that to successfully execute a hybrid cloud strategy, IT and

business decision makers must collaborate and create new models for shared governance

across complex hybrid cloud environments (see Figure 13).

Hybrid cloud (n=456)

Non-hybrid (n=255)

Extremely different Somewhat different No effect

40

14

36

44

24

42

(% of respondents)



FIGURE 13

Collaboration Across Business and IT Becomes the Norm

Source: IDC, 2014

Worldwide, survey participants indicate that they see important long-term roles for central IT

to lead the charge related to IT infrastructure (defining, sourcing, and managing), application

development and test modernization, as well as big data and security in terms of identity and

access control. Line-of-business decision makers will lead compliance and risk management

initiatives with technical support from IT.

However, cloud-related decision making needs to be more collaborative, with business and

IT sharing tasks such as shaping the organization’s overall strategy and defining the core

configuration, compliance, and service standards that will govern day-to-day operation of the

hybrid environment. Business and IT decision makers will also need to take a collaborative

approach to the evaluation and selection of public cloud services and with regard to initiatives

related to business process automation, mobility, and end-user support.

Successful hybrid cloud strategies have the potential to transform business — their success

depends on collaboration and coordination across a broad base of business and IT stakeholders.



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