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To put a spin on a famous Mark Twain misquote, reports of hybrid cloud’s life have been greatly exaggerated.
That is the key finding from a new customer study conducted by EMC and VMware, which argues nine out of 10 survey respondents have not got past the proof of concept stage for hybrid cloud, as well as having no consistent method of evaluating workloads.
Regular readers of this publication will know the message from executives is that hybrid has represented the bright, shiny future of IT delivery for a few years. The latest North Bridge report on the future of cloud computing, in January, argued hybrid cloud usage will double in two years, while another study from EMC in the same month found the vast majority of respondents argued hybrid capabilities were ‘important’ or ‘critical’ for digital business transformation.
Despite this, the latest findings insist the majority of companies are not where they want to be in terms of having a well engineered hybrid cloud architecture. Those in the top percentile, with the highest maturity, generally have less than 20% of their production apps in a hybrid environment. Regarding virtualisation, the top performing organisations have 80% compute virtualisation, with the numbers dropping to between 60% and 70% for storage and application. Not surprisingly, the majority of respondents want between 80% and 100% virtualisation across all areas.
The report also found some wild anomalies between what organisations want to do and how they are actually operating. 95% of those polled said it was critical for IT departments to break down silos, yet only 4% say they are operating like this, while more than half of firms have no strategy documentation with executive and line of business support despite 90% arguing its importance.
“Organisations in a variety of global, vertical industries can benefit from the implementation of a robust IT service strategy, powered by software-defined technologies,” said Loretta Brown, VP federation at VMware in a statement. “Together, with EMC, our mutual customers can achieve IT transformation by easily extending their private cloud workloads to and from the public cloud, while managing, securing and connecting all of their applications across all clouds and all devices.”