Eight Important Facts About Hybrid Cloud Migration

A new study shows that businesses are moving toward adoption of the cloud, but opting for a hybrid approach to leave some infrastructure on premises.

IT infrastructures have evolved from traditional on-premises-only to a hybrid strategy that links internal and external IT services driven by the existence of the cloud. According to the SolarWinds Trends Report, only 9 percent of IT pros surveyed said they have not migrated any of their organization’s infrastructure to the cloud.

Moreover, 92 percent of IT professionals said adopting cloud technologies is important to their organization’s long-term business success, while 27 percent said it is extremely important.

Still, only 43 percent estimate that half or more of their organizations’ total IT infrastructure will be in the cloud within the next three to five years; 60 percent said it’s unlikely that all of their organizations’ infrastructure will ever be migrated to the cloud.

As instances of hybrid IT strategies continue to grow, IT professionals are now faced with a dual mandate: increase efficiency through cloud services while also ensuring critical systems, databases and applications are secure. Of the many potential benefits, survey respondents identified infrastructure cost-reduction, increased infrastructure flexibility and agility, and relieving internal IT personnel of day-to-day management of some infrastructure as the top three benefits of hybrid IT by weighted rank.

Respondents identified security and compliance concerns as the number one barrier to cloud adoption by weighted rank, and 62 percent said security is also the biggest challenge of managing current hybrid IT environments.

The shift from traditional on-premises infrastructure to hybrid IT environments has created the need for new skills, resources, development and training for IT professionals managing these environments. Without these skills and resources, IT professionals are unlikely to be set up for success to drive the hybrid IT migration forward and enable their organizations to better meet business objectives. With this in mind, only 27 percent said they are certain their IT organizations currently have the necessary resources to manage a hybrid IT environment.

Survey respondents also identified the top five skills needed to better manage a hybrid environment, namely hybrid IT monitoring/management tools and metrics, application migration, distributed architectures, service-oriented architectures and automation/vendor management.

More than half (56 percent) of IT pros surveyed said they think they have the level of support needed from leadership and the organization as a whole to develop/improve these skills needed to better manage hybrid IT environments.