More than half of cloud conference attendees are adopting hybrid cloud strategy

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58% of attendees at the 2014 Cloud Expo and the AWS Summit, in New York, have indicated they are building hybrid cloud solutions for their organisations, according to a survey.

According to the survey, conducted by Avere Systems, the same number (58%) said they were planning on migrating at least some of their on-prem applications to the cloud within the next two years.

Archiving is the most popular aspect of enterprises that are being moved to the cloud, with 28% of the vote. This was followed by corporate file sharing on 22%, with 18% of respondents admitting they would move their entire business to the cloud.

Half (49%) of respondents said that Amazon Web Services was their cloud of choice for storage, compared with 19% for Google, and 13% for Microsoft Azure. More than half (56%) of respondents are looking at deploying AWS for object storage.

Over a quarter (26%) of those polled indicated their top level executive team was driving cloud strategy within their organisations. A similar number (22%) said it was their storage and data management teams leading the charge.

It’s yet more evidence that hybrid cloud – a mix of cloud and on-premise for mission critical applications – is seen as the way forward, not just for smaller businesses but for the enterprise market.

Cloud service providers are increasingly noticing this. VMware, for instance, has hybrid cloud as one of its three strategic priorities, alongside software defined data centres and end user computing. CenturyLink and Rackspace have also kickstarted initiatives for managed hosting services in recent months.