How Hybrid Cloud Has Driven Performance During Pandemic

A funny thing happened on the way to the digital transformation. As COVID accelerated transformations over the last two years, most organizations quickly realized their IT infrastructures required a serious performance boost to keep up.

Ninety-four percent of respondents to a recent ESG survey, sponsored by Hitachi Vantara, indicated their apps, infrastructure and services needed to move at least 25% faster than three years ago and nearly 50% indicated their apps, infrastructure and services needed to move at least 50% faster.

How’d they do it? There were a few go-to moves that many companies employed, including more robust automation, DevOps, and AIOps, for example. But the most common theme to achieving faster performance according to the study was the adoption of hybrid cloud. 

Several inherent features and functionalities that are baked into a hybrid cloud strategy have lent themselves to better performance, but at the core has been the agility and cost optimization that it affords. The agility and nimbleness of application deployment and data management, for example, across increasingly complicated environments can be tangible. Cost has been a key factor because, to be faster, requires investment in modernization.

According to the ESG ebook, Observability from Code to Cloud, analysts Scott Sinclair and Rob Strechay,  “…as more organizations pursue hybrid cloud strategies in which they are constantly weighing whether to run their applications on public cloud infrastructure or in their own on-premises data centers. Indeed, 86% of respondent organizations are currently leveraging a third-party tool to optimize cloud costs.”

In addition to cost optimization, the myriad advantages of as-a-Service opportunities, played a big role in accelerating performance. Storage as a Service (STaaS), for example, reinforces the key points from above, and then some. STaaS is more cost-effective, more efficient, faster, and can be the core pillar of the on-prem component of your hybrid cloud strategy with public cloud cost economics. It puts the vendor in your court to take some of the burden of risk and uncertainty of rapid transformation away from you and onto our own shoulders.

As COVID led to an acceleration of digital transformation across industries, exposing a need for speed within IT along the way, organizations responded. Through hybrid cloud and all that it offers, a great number of companies have emerged from the pandemic stronger and more agile for the future. 

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