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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.