Last month, I sat down to chat with HPE’s Vice President and Cloud Strategist, Robert Christiansen, for the Futurum Tech Podcast. We had a great discussion about the state of hybrid cloud and the issues it creates for companies operating in today’s digital transformation.
Futurum Research recently worked with HPE to do a pulse survey on hybrid cloud. We polled 166 respondents, most of them decision-makers in the C-Suite. All were from companies with 1,000+ employees, and many came from companies with 50,000+ employees. The findings indicated that most companies are still working out the basics: How do we find value in the cloud? How do we deploy it well? How do we make cloud adoption easier so that everyone is on board with it? How do we secure it?
At the same time, we found that companies are facing numerous complications as they move forward in this new cloud environment. For instance, multi-cloud has gained popularity because each cloud has its own benefits, such as security, data portability, pop location, pricing, integration, etc. But many companies are finding that there are significant consequences to working with fragmented cloud environments, and some of those consequences—a lack of flexibility and agility—are the antithesis of what they moved to the cloud to find.
As a result, we’re seeing many companies move from cloud back to a mix of cloud and on-premises computing. The following are just a few takeaways from Robert’s and my discussion during the podcast.
- Public cloud providers are changing their stance from cloud-first to hybrid. They’re realizing that most companies do have significant needs for keeping some data on-premises right now. How do they deal with it? They push their own platforms on premises, allowing them to keep the business and lock companies into their platforms.
- Multi-cloud apps have a multiplier, negative cost effect on the internal IT support organization. Companies should go as deep as they can with a single hyperscaler, whether it’s Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud Platform.
- Unless you have a data portability strategy, you don’t have an app portability strategy. Apps are going to go where the data is going to be. You need the compute, storage, and data to be together in the same place to work with maximum efficiency. This is a huge complication in hybrid cloud today.
- Culture is still significant in effective cloud strategy. Creating an organizational construct—a cloud business office—that knocks down team siloes and serves the business with agile motion—is essential for success.
If you’re interested in hearing about these key topics and more, stream the entire podcast today (or read the transcript). We also did a webinar on this topic that you can find here: Finding Your Right Mix of Hybrid Cloud.
Futurum Research provides industry research and analysis. These columns are for educational purposes only and should not be considered in any way investment advice.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
