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As enterprises increasingly recognise the significant value and opportunity that cloud computing presents, they continue to invest in and grow their cloud strategy. According to Gartner, the use of cloud computing is growing, and by 2016 this growth will increase to become the bulk of new IT spend.

In spite of this, Gartner estimated that, by 2020, on-premise cloud will still account for 70 per cent of the total market and VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger stated that, currently, over 92 per cent of cloud deployments are still on-premise or private. Indeed, in NaviSite’s own recent survey of over 250 UK and US IT professionals, over 89 per cent of UK respondents stated that deploying some sort of private cloud and hybrid infrastructure is a priority within the next 12 months.

There are many good reasons for organisations still opting for applications on hardware owned and managed in-house. Most organisations still have large investments in technology, people, and processes that cannot simply be written-off; certain workloads still do not suit virtualised or multi-tenanted platforms; renting resources is not always cheaper or better than owning them; and there are valid security and compliance reasons for keeping certain data on-premise.

In spite of these concerns, however, the public cloud continues to grow at a ferocious rate, validating the benefits that this infrastructure delivery model offers. That certain data and workloads are better suited for a private cloud infrastructure or for a physical hosted platform therefore seems to be the caveat that opens the door to hybrid solutions. Although many UK businesses have migrated certain applications to the cloud, over three quarters of respondents in NaviSite’s recent survey had migrated under fifty per cent of their infrastructure to the cloud.

A hybrid solution gives organisations the option of scaling resources for specific workloads and running applications on the most appropriate platform for a particular given task. A highly dynamic application with varying spikes may be best supported in the public cloud, a performance-intensive application may be better suited running from the private cloud and a dataset with high regulatory requirements may need to remain on a physical hosted platform. A hybrid solution allows an organisation to place their data where regulatory or security requirements dictate. This is significant as 59 per cent of UK IT professionals surveyed by NaviSite still cite security as their main concern with cloud migration.

Hybrid continues to grow as it is the solution that offers organisations the best of both worlds. For IT leaders, a hybrid strategy that pragmatically embraces the new, whilst making best use of current-state is essential. By going hybrid, today’s IT leaders can pick the best-fit strategy for the current demands of their business, within a flexible framework that will enable them to manage future change.

Buzzword alert: Microservices and IoT at a DevOps conference? What could possibly go wrong? Join this panel of experts as they peel away the buzz and discuss the important architectural principles behind implementing IoT solutions for the enterprise. As remote IoT devices and sensors become increasingly intelligent, they become part of our distributed cloud environment, and we must architect and code accordingly. At the very least, you’ll have no problem filling in your buzzword bingo cards.

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One of the unintended consequences of cloud is the operational inconsistency it introduces. That inconsistency is introduced because cloud commoditizes the infrastructure we’re used to having control over and visibility into. everything from the core network to the application services upon which business and operations relies to ensure performance, availability and security are often times obscured behind simplified services whose policies and configurations cannot be reconciled with those we maintain on-premise.

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Cloud service providers (CSPs) can no longer treat security as a luxurious add-on, and customers have to ensure their providers take care of the issue, a new report asserts.

The research, the latest cab off the rank from Ovum and FireHost entitled “The Role of Security in Cloud Adoption within the Enterprise”, offers sound advice to vendors and users alike. True, it’s stuff everyone will have heard before – but it’s worth repeating.

“On too many occasions, security has been positioned as an afterthought when new technology initiatives have been brought to market,” Ovum analyst Andrew Kellett writes. “Any service that includes access via public networks cannot ignore user and data protection requirements.”

It’s certainly a view FireHost agrees with. “For too long, businesses have made assumptions about the security of their cloud service providers,” said Eleri Gibbon, FireHost EMEA VP. “In the instance of a data breach, the client suffers the consequences. That doesn’t sit right with me – after all, if your house falls down unexpectedly, you’d expect people to ask questions about how it was built in the first place.”

It’s safe to say too that companies aren’t exactly over-confident in their providers’ ability to put out the fires. Ovum research shows 92% of enterprises globally have concerns with their CSP over shared cloud infrastructure security issues. It’s a similar number with a lack of control over where data is kept (92%) and a lack of visibility into security controls available (91%).

What may be driving this? If the CSP can’t deal with threats, don’t expect the customer to: a recent Informatica and Ponemon Institute study found 60% of global respondents were “not confident” they had the ability to proactively respond to cloud-based data threats.

However, not all is lost. Kellett argues security should be seen as a “positive driver” for organisations. “Despite well-known security and compliance concerns, there are positive to be gained from working with a cloud-based service provider that includes security and compliance facilities as baked-in components of its overall service delivery model,” he wrote.

“All cloud solutions should be expected to include elements of security as part of the overall offering, but not all cloud security has been created equally or built to achieve the same levels of protection,” he added.