In a recent Spiceworks survey of 300 U.S. IT decision-makers, 93% of respondents said their organization is using or considering a hybrid IT approach within the next year.1 According to one respondent, “Some of our business-critical services (email, file storage, etc.) can benefit from the reliability of the cloud since our headquarters is in a hurricane-prone area.”1
Almost 90% of respondents said hybrid IT is important to their current IT strategy, and nearly all (96%) expect it to be important to their future IT strategy—including half who said it would be critical for the future.1
Driving this trend is the desire to keep up with technology, according to the survey. Many of those who have already deployed or have started deploying a hybrid IT infrastructure said they see it as necessary for the future.1 As businesses grow, they need their infrastructure to keep up with the pace of that growth, something static on-premises infrastructures might not be able to do, particularly those organizations with limited staff or shrinking IT departments being asked to do more with fewer resources.
“We need a hybrid IT approach to survive in today’s hyper-competitive marketplace,” said one respondent. Another wrote, “Hybrid IT is the way of the future. No more clunky power-hogging servers cluttering up a room; you also have less to worry about.”1
“The hybrid model definitely appears to offer greater uptimes and reduced maintenance with easier expansion and support availability.”—IT pro, Spiceworks survey1
Top 3 factors that lead organizations to use or consider a hybrid IT approach: 1
Technology refresh/modernization
Growing business/infrastructure needs
Limited IT staff resources and time to manage on-premises infrastructure
The cloud portion of hybrid IT is primarily used to support websites, data backup needs, and digital marketing/ecommerce initiatives. But the trend is toward not just increased usage in those areas, but in other areas, as well, including productivity and communications/collaboration apps, mobile services, and the Internet of Things—workloads that are primarily managed on-premises currently.
Even with the emergence of hybrid IT, though, there are some workloads that are going to primarily stay on-premises, such as relational databases and apps dealing with operations, HR, and finance because of security concerns, compliance regulations, or the costs of modernizing equipment.1 One of the strongest aspects of the hybrid approach is that it allows for both workload deployment options; companies can determine which applications should stay on-premises and which can be put in the cloud to save money and staff hours.
“Cloud services are getting more reliable and less expensive. What used to only make sense in certain cases is starting to make sense in most cases.”—IT pro, Spiceworks survey1