Cisco Study Finds Hybrid Clouds Are Now the Norm

As enterprises look to improve operations, many are turning to a hybrid cloud strategy, which blends on-prem and hosted services.

Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst

July 22, 2022

2 Min Read
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Businesses have been moving to a cloud operating model for the better part of two decades, but the term “cloud” has been continuously evolving. Early cloud deployments were akin to hosted services where a business would “lift and shift” a workload to an offsite location. For the past decade or so, cloud has been defined by public clouds, where businesses would deploy data and/or workloads in a hyper-scaler such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.

Based on my conversations with IT leaders, it’s been my thesis that we are in the midst of the next evolutionary step in cloud, and that’s hybrid cloud, which is defined as a combination of two more clouds that are centrally managed. This can include on-premises private, hosted private, or public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud.

One good anecdotal proof point that the hybrid cloud is real is that all “big three” cloud providers (Amazon, Google, and Microsoft) all have their own hybrid cloud offerings. I recall the Re:Invent 2019 event when AWS released Outposts. In the analysts’ Q&A session, I asked then-head of AWS Andy Jassey why the company chose to come to market with its own private cloud stack, and he gave a very simple answer of “because our enterprise customers want it.”

Cisco recently released its “2022 Global Hybrid Cloud Trends Report,” which examines the promise of hybrid cloud and offers guidance to businesses making the transition to a hybrid cloud model. The report is based on data collected from a survey of 2,500 global IT decision-makers and professionals in cloud operations (CloudOps), development and IT operations (DevOps), and enterprise networking roles. The survey was conducted between April 11 and May 6, 2022, in 13 countries across North America, Latin America, Western Europe, and Asia-Pacific.

In the report, Cisco recommends moving to an infrastructure strategy that is cloud-ready and uses a cloud-smart operations model.

Read the rest of this article on No Jitter.
 

About the Author

Zeus Kerravala

Founder and Principal Analyst, ZK Research

Zeus Kerravala is the founder and principal analyst with ZK Research.

Kerravala provides a mix of tactical advice to help his clients in the current business climate and long term strategic advice. Kerravala provides research and advice to the following constituents: End user IT and network managers, vendors of IT hardware, software and services and the financial community looking to invest in the companies that he covers.

Kerravala does research through a mix of end user and channel interviews, surveys of IT buyers, investor interviews as well as briefings from the IT vendor community. This gives Kerravala a 360 degree view of the technologies he covers from buyers of technology, investors, resellers and manufacturers.

Kerravala uses the traditional on line and email distribution channel for the research but heavily augments opinion and insight through social media including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Blogs. Kerravala is also heavily quoted in business press and the technology press and is a regular speaker at events such as Interop and Enterprise Connect.

Prior to ZK Research, Zeus Kerravala spent 10 years as an analyst at Yankee Group. He joined Yankee Group in March 2001 as a Director and left Yankee Group as a Senior Vice President and Distinguished Research Fellow, the firm's most senior research analyst. Before Yankee Group, Kerravala had a number of technical roles including a senior technical position at Greenwich Technology Partners (GTP). Prior to GTP, Kerravala had numerous internal IT positions including VP of IT and Deputy CIO of Ferris, Baker Watts and Senior Project Manager at Alex. Brown and Sons Inc.

Kerravala holds a Bachelor of Science in physics and mathematics from the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.

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