News

Survey Indicates 'Hybrid Cloud Is the Future,' NetApp Says

• By David Ramel
• 12/13/2021

NetApp says a small survey of organizations using its software indicates hybrid cloud is the future of enterprise IT.

The cloud-led, data-centric software company surveyed 79 organizations around the world that have deployed or plan to deploy hybrid cloud architectures with NetApp.

"Speed is the new scale. IT leaders everywhere are accelerating digital transformation efforts, requiring more agility and flexibility to stay ahead of their competition and deliver immediate business impact," said exec Ronen Schwartz in a Dec. 9 news release. "Enterprises are embracing hybrid cloud models to effectively scale out IT resources to support business-critical applications and workloads -- and NetApp is leading the industry in providing hybrid multi-cloud solutions to meet these organizations wherever they are."

Highlights of the survey listed by NetApp include:

• The Future is Hybrid Cloud: More than three-quarters of respondents said their organization plans to operate a hybrid cloud environment for the foreseeable future, while only 17 percent expect their organization to eventually migrate all IT to the cloud. Those surveyed listed the most important business benefits of hybrid cloud adoption to be:
  • Faster Innovation - 26 percent
  • Increased Responsiveness to Customers - 25 percent
  • Increased Collaboration - 22 percent

  

• Key Operational Drivers for Hybrid Cloud Adoption: Respondents indicated they are looking to improve infrastructure flexibility and scale (27 percent), as hybrid cloud designs help IT teams get access to the on-demand and emerging technologies offered by public cloud while still leveraging legacy systems running reliably on-premises. Nearly a quarter (21 percent) said they needed to optimize costs, while 13 percent said they needed to improve data accessibility.

  

• Data Protection Remains Top Priority with Other Use Cases Gaining Traction: Data protection (including disaster recovery, backup and archiving) was the most popular hybrid cloud use case selected with 29 percent stating they are either utilizing hybrid cloud for data protection today or plan to within 24 months. However, customer respondents indicated they are also leveraging hybrid cloud for production use cases more than anticipated: 20 percent said they are currently integrating both on-premises and cloud resources to support the same workload for hybrid production, with 17 percent planning to do so within 24 months.