Successful Hybrid Clouds Depend on Collaborative Business and IT Management

Document #251874 © 2014 IDC. www.idc.com | Page 1
IDC White Paper | Successful Hybrid Clouds Depend on Collaborative Business and IT Management
IDC OPINION
IDC’s research shows that business, government, and nonprofit organizations around the
world are rapidly implementing hybrid cloud architectures to improve service levels and
business agility. The results of a recent worldwide IDC survey (Hybrid Cloud Survey) of 711
business and IT decision makers, sponsored by VMware, show how successful adoption of
hybrid cloud strategies can dramatically increase business value — if bolstered with new,
more collaborative business and IT decision making and governance approaches. Specifically:
» 64% of participants identify their current or planned cloud strategy as hybrid cloud.
» 70% of participants believe hybrid cloud is very important or critical to the success of their
business.
» 54% of hybrid cloud adopters believe the majority of their future revenue and business
growth will be tied to hybrid cloud.
» Integration with non-cloud resources and improved business and IT coordination is most
often identified as being critical to successful execution of hybrid cloud strategies.
» Business and IT teams will increasingly collaborate on making critical decisions about
cloud strategies, public cloud service selection, standards, SLAs, and end-user support.
In This White Paper
This white paper discusses the results of a worldwide Web-based survey conducted by IDC
during June 2014. The survey was sponsored by VMware. The 711 participants were selected
for their knowledge of their organization’s current and planned cloud strategies.
Successful Hybrid Clouds
Depend on Collaborative
Business and IT Management
Sponsored by: VMware
Author:
Mary Johnston Turner
October 2014
Highlights
64%
of participants identify their
current or planned cloud
strategy as hybrid cloud
70%
of participants believe
hybrid cloud is very
important or critical to the
success of their business
54%
of hybrid cloud adopters
believe the majority of
their future revenue and
business growth will be
tied to hybrid cloud

n = 711
Base = all respondents
Notes:
This survey was managed by IDC’s Quantitative
Research Group.
Data is not weighted.
Multiple responses were allowed.
Use caution when interpreting small sample sizes.
Source: IDC’s Hybrid Cloud Survey, June 2014
Participants represented a mix of business (40%) and IT (60%) decision makers from a wide
range of industries, company sizes, and geographies. This survey was designed to better
understand the impact of hybrid cloud strategies on business performance, decision making,
and agility. All participants represented organizations that currently use or plan to use one
or more cloud resources, including on-premise and/or hosted private cloud; public SaaS,
public IaaS, and public PaaS; and virtual private cloud services. Participants with no current or
planned use of any type of cloud capability were excluded from this survey.
Situation Overview
Hybrid Cloud Strategies Dominate Enterprise IT Sourcing Plans
IDC’s research shows that hybrid cloud architectures are widespread today and will exist well
into the future as IT and business decision makers proactively match business application and
workload requirements to an ever-increasing array of IT sourcing and management models.
As Figure 1 shows, worldwide, the majority of survey participants currently rely on traditional
in-house IT, virtual servers, hosted and/or on-premise private clouds, and a range of public
cloud offerings. Virtual private cloud and hosted/managed private cloud services are the most
frequently mentioned strategies overall for the next 12–36 months.
FIGURE 1
Current and Future Worldwide IT Sourcing
and Management Models
54
45
39
34
31
29
23
15
14
12
10
Traditional in-house IT
Hosted/managed private cloud
Virtual private cloud
Tradational hosted, colocation, or outsourced IT
Virtual servers
Public cloud services
On-premise private cloud
Multi-tenant public cloud
Non-virtualized infrastructure
Dedicated public cloud
Platform as a service
(% of respondents)
Current
45
43
37
35
29
28
22
16
14
14
12
Virtual private cloud
Hosted/managed private cloud
Traditional in-house IT
Tradational hosted, colocation, or outsourced IT
Public cloud services
Virtual servers
On-premise private cloud
Dedicated public cloud
Non-virtualized infrastructure
Multi-tenant public cloud
Platform as a service
(% of respondents)
Future
Q. Current: Thinking about your organization’s
overall IT environment, please indicate which
types of IT sourcing and management models
you have in place today.
Q. Future: Please indicate which types of IT
sourcing and management models you expect
to have implemented within your organization
over the next 12–36 months.

Many organizations are
beginning to refer to
this new environment
as a hybrid cloud.
Many organizations are still struggling with how to best describe this shift to mixed
IT sourcing and management models. Most decision makers recognize that they are
experiencing a number of critical changes in terms of IT architectures and management,
including:
» Migration from physical to virtual and software-defined infrastructure
» Adoption of policy-driven approaches to management and allocation of resources
» Replacement of fragmented, proprietary, device-specific management platforms with
standards-based unified approaches to provision, configure, monitor, and optimize the
use of on-premise infrastructure, dedicated managed services, and shared public cloud
services
» Replacement of IT-centric decision-making processes with collaborative, business-led
approaches to cloud solution selection, operational governance, and day-to-day end-user
empowerment
Many organizations are beginning to refer to this new environment as a hybrid cloud. Survey
participants held a variety of opinions when it came to providing a detailed definition of
hybrid cloud. As Figure 2 shows:
» 38% define hybrid cloud as “an IT environment that uses a mix of public cloud services and
dedicated IT assets, including virtualization and private cloud.”
» 23% define hybrid cloud as “a composition of two or more distinct cloud infrastructures
(private or public) that remain unique entities but are bound together by standardized or
proprietary technology that enables data and application portability (e.g., cloud bursting
for load balancing between clouds).
» Others define hybrid cloud as “subscription to multiple cloud services from different cloud
service providers for different business needs” (11%) or “a datacenter environment that
supports multiple vendors’ hypervisors” (11%). There was little variation across regions
indicating worldwide IT and line-of-business decision makers have varied ideas about
what the term hybrid cloud means specifically.

14%
22%
64%
Yes No Unsure
FIGURE 2
Definitions of Hybrid Cloud Vary
Q. What does the term “hybrid cloud” mean to you?
n = 711
Regardless of the detailed definition, IT and line-of-business decision makers recognize that
this move to software-controlled IT environments — dynamically managed using business
policies and automation — represents a fundamentally new way of procuring, delivering,
and operating IT. In fact, 64% of survey participants define their cloud strategy as hybrid (see
Figure 3).
FIGURE 3
Use of Hybrid Cloud
Q. Would you describe your organization’s current or planned cloud strategy as hybrid cloud?
n = 711
Notes:
This survey was managed by IDC’s Quantitative Research Group.
38
23
11
11
8
Mix of public cloud services and dedicated IT assets
A composition of two or more distinct cloud infrastructures
Datacenter supports multiple hypervisor worlds
Subscription to multiple cloud services
Workloads are highly portable and automatically
burst/load balance across public/private clouds
Manage all IT resources using same
service catalog, SLAs, etc.
(% of respondents)
5

Regional Priorities for Hybrid Cloud
Decision makers in the United States (71%) are most likely to describe their cloud strategies as hybrid, although almost
two-thirds (63%) of decision makers in EMEA and Asia also describe their organization’s approach to cloud as hybrid.
FIGURE A
Hybrid Cloud Strategies by Region
Q. Would you describe your organization’s current or planned cloud strategy as hybrid cloud?
A look at the mix of public and private cloud options in use and under consideration today to support strategic
business initiatives shows that organizations in the United States are ahead of organizations in Asia and EMEA in
considering public cloud options, with 70% of United States–based survey participants stating their organization is
currently using or considering using SaaS and IaaS and 63% using or considering PaaS. The majority of organizations
based in Asia are using or considering SaaS (60%), IaaS (59%), and PaaS (52%), while EMEA lags behind slightly with just
about half of organizations considering these different public cloud options. Organizations in EMEA are slightly more
likely to be using or considering some type of private cloud than their counterparts in the United States or Asia.
FIGURE B
Cloud Consideration by Region
Q. What type of cloud services or resources is your organization currently using or considering using to support your organization’s
strategic business initiatives?
63
63
71
Asia (n=230)
EMEA (n=354)
United States (n=127)
(% of respondents describing cloud strategy as hybrid)
(% of respondents)
60
50
70
52
50
63
59
54
70
35
42
39
Public cloud SaaS
Public cloud IaaS
Public cloud PaaS
Private cloud
Asia (n=230)
EMEA (n=354)

Regardless of whether an organization describes its cloud strategy as hybrid, participants
recognize the strategic role cloud can play in enabling a new generation of dynamic, agile
business applications. Most participants expect to run a wide range of workloads and
applications across their cloud environments over the next several years. As Figure 4 shows,
big data and analytics are most often identified as workloads for which cloud is highly
strategic. Big data and analytics workloads frequently require access to large-scale computing
and storage resources and can benefit directly from the ability to make variable levels of
resources available on demand. All regions agree on this priority.
Other applications frequently seen benefiting from cloud include ecommerce, collaboration,
and end-user productivity applications such as email, on-demand compute and storage, and
VDI. These types of applications are frequently enabled via public cloud services or hybrid
n-tier architectures that rely on traditional back-end on-premise technologies but deploy
Web front-end services into public clouds to support a wide range of traditional and mobile
users. Decision makers in the United States were more likely to see cloud as strategic to
their ecommerce solutions, while participants in EMEA were more likely to call out mobile
applications and VDI. Participants based in Asia indicated that cloud was very strategic for
collaboration and personal productivity workloads.
FIGURE 4
Top 10 Strategic Cloud Workloads
Q. For which workloads is your organization’s cloud approach considered most strategic?
n = 711
Notes:
44
36
36
36
35
35
34
33
32
31
Big data and analytics
E-commerce/customer/partner services
Collaboration/end-user productivity
On-demand compute and storage
Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)
Logistics/inventory/supply chain management
Mobile application and device managment
New cloud-enabled revenue-generating services
Content serving and archiving
Development and testing
(% of respondents)

Significant Business Benefits Expected from Hybrid Cloud
Even more importantly, worldwide decision makers recognize the benefits that can result
from the use of a hybrid cloud strategy. Among decision makers that define their current or
planned cloud strategy as hybrid cloud, approximately half (52%) state that having control
over critical assets and information combined with agility from public cloud is a top benefit
of a hybrid strategy. The other major benefits include optimized cost and performance (46%),
consistent end-user experience using common self-service portals and automation (45%),
and business agility and differentiation (45%) (see Figure 5).
FIGURE 5
Benefits Expected from Hybrid Cloud
Q. What benefits do you expect your organization to get from adopting a hybrid cloud strategy?
n = 456
Base = respondents who define current or planned cloud strategy as hybrid
Notes:
Investments in hybrid cloud solutions are expected to pay off over the long run. Both IT
and line-of-business decision makers recognize that the transition to hybrid cloud will have
long-term impacts on their organization’s ability to compete in global markets. In fact, 70%
believe hybrid cloud will be critical or very important to helping their organization achieve its
business goals and compete effectively in 2020 (see Figure 6). Sentiments on this topic were
very consistent globally.
52
46
46
46
30
25
8
Control over critical assets and information
combined with public cloud agility
Optimized cost and performance
Consistent end-user experience via self-service
portal and automation
Business agility and differentiation
Business continuity/DR
Best leverage of in-house IT skills
Avoid vendor lock-in/flexibility to
migrate workloads as needed
(% of respondents)

A Regional View of Hybrid Cloud Benefits
A look at the regional breakout of expected benefits shows that participants based in the United States feel particularly
strongly about benefits related to being able to balance control of critical assets with agility benefits from public cloud.
They also expect to see benefits associated with their ability to improve overall business agility and differentiation.
Decision makers in Asia tend to most strongly associate the benefits of hybrid cloud with balancing control and
public cloud agility, providing consistent end-user self-service experiences, and optimizing cost and performance.
Organizations in EMEA place almost equal priority on balancing control with public cloud agility, business agility and
differentiation, user experience, and optimized cost and performance.
FIGURE C
Expected Hybrid Cloud Benefits by Region
Q. What benefits do you expect your organization to get from adopting a hybrid cloud strategy?
Base = respondents who define current or planned cloud strategy as hybrid
(% of respondents)
51
47
64
49
44
44
17
29
29
35
45
63
21
31
40
49
45
43
8
9
4
Asia (n=144)
EMEA (n=222)
Control over critical assets and information
combined with public cloud agility
Business agility and differentiation
Consistent end-user experience via self-service
portal and automation
Optimized cost and performance
Business continuity/DR
Best leverage of in-house IT skills
Avoid vendor lock-in/flexibility to
migrate workloads as needed

Most survey participants expect that cloud investments will directly impact future business
growth and revenue (see Figure 7). This is true among both IT and line-of-business decision
makers across all regions.
FIGURE 6
Level of Importance of Hybrid Cloud for Business
Success over the Long Term
Q. On a scale of 1 to 5, how important will a hybrid cloud environment be in helping your organization
achieve its business goals and compete effectively in 2020?
FIGURE 7
Impact of Cloud on Future Revenue
and Business Growth
Q. How much of your organization’s future revenue and business growth will be tied to cloud?
n = 711
Notes:
Research Group.
Data is measured on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 =
“not at all important” and 5 = “critical.”
n = 711
Notes:
This survey was managed by IDC’s
Quantitative Research Group.
Use caution when interpreting small
sample sizes.
Source: IDC’s Hybrid Cloud Survey,
June 2014
2
6
18
24
28
Under 10%
10–19%
20–39%
40–59%
60–79%
80–99%
100%
(% of respondents)
(% of future revenue and business
growth related to cloud)
13
8
30%
70%
Less important Critical/very important

Future Outlook
New Roles Emerge for Central IT Teams
Hybrid cloud environments change the status quo in terms of how IT resources are sourced and
managed. They also require new approaches to the way organizations make decisions about a
number of important factors, including:
» Governance for defining SLAs and configuration standards for mission-critical workloads
» Priorities for end-user support, flexibility, mobility, and self-service
» Guidelines for selecting and monitoring public cloud services
» Decision making about where to deploy workloads across public, private, or non-cloud IT
resources
» Security and compliance requirements
Organizations committed to hybrid cloud strategies are more than twice as likely (57%) as
organizations that do not have a hybrid cloud strategy (22%) to report IT does very well in
meeting the needs of the business. These organizations have recognized that the rate of change
facing IT cannot be handled using traditional fragmented manual processes. Rather, they have
invested time and effort in finding new ways to collaborate across business and IT teams to
better align decisions about IT spending and priorities (see Figure 8).
FIGURE 8
Role of Hybrid Cloud in Aligning Business and IT Priorities
Q. How well does your central/corporate IT organization currently meet the needs of the business?
n = 711
Notes:
Research Group.
Hybrid cloud (n=456)
Non-hybrid (n=255)
Very well Adequately Poorly Unsure
57
22
39
70
4
7
(% of respondents)

As the scale and complexity of hybrid cloud environments expand, many organizations are
starting to recognize that there is value in a collaborative approach that allows business
decision makers to focus on day-to-day business issues and offloads the need for them to
evaluate, monitor, and police cloud service offerings coming from a wide variety of third-party
vendors. While individual line-of-business teams benefited from near-instant access
to early cloud services for the needs of development and test and individual project teams,
many businesses have found it difficult to manage these service provider relationships as they
proliferate.
As Figure 9 shows, IT and line-of-business decision makers agree that over the long term,
one of the most strategic roles for central IT organizations will be managing the selection
and quality of public cloud services (52%). Other important roles for central IT are expected
to include optimizing IT spend and chargeback across all cloud and non-cloud resources
(49%) and maintaining central application dev/test/QA resources (45%) regardless of whether
they are enabled in-house or via a public cloud service. Regardless of geographic region,
participants agreed on these priorities.
FIGURE 9
Most Important Roles for Central IT by 2020
Q. What do you see as the most important role(s) for the central IT organization by 2020?
n = 711
Notes:
52
49
45
43
42
40
38
30
26
Manage selection and quality of public cloud services
Optimize all IT spend and chargeback as appropriate
Maintain central app dev/test/QA
Enable seamless self-service across all internal and external IT
Manage end-user devices and apps
Internal provider of IT infrastructure to BUs
Day-to-day operation of external revenue-generating online services
Help business use new technology to innovate
Protect sensitive data/manage business risk
(% of respondents)

New Governance, Process, and Enabling Technology Priorities Appear
The ability of an organization to benefit from the business agility enabled by cloud, and to achieve
business and IT goals, frequently depends as much on process and governance as it does on
investment in the state of the enabling technologies. When asked to consider factors that might
be hampering their ability to execute their cloud strategies successfully, survey participants
agreed that they need better integration across cloud and non-cloud resources (43%) and better
coordination between business and IT stakeholders (41%). There was little geographical variation
in these priorities (see Figure 10).
FIGURE 10
Most Important Roles for Central IT by 2020
Q. Which of the following areas of your organization’s overall cloud strategy need the most improvement?
The shift from managing technology based on the health of individual devices and components
to managing technology based on end-to-end service levels and SLAs is fundamental to hybrid
cloud strategies. As business needs shift and workload requirements vary unpredictably, IT
organizations will make greater use of automated self-service provisioning, dynamic capacity
analysis, and active workload migration technologies to optimize the consumption of resources
and the costs incurred. The ability to make changes rapidly requires that business and IT
teams have agreed on security and access policies, configuration standards, and end-to-end
performance SLAs. Automation, orchestration, and integrated software-defined datacenter
management solutions will be needed to execute cloud strategies on demand.
n = 711
Notes:
sample sizes.
June 2014
43
41
38
36
35
32
22
22
22
22
Integration with non-cloud resources
Coordination between business and IT
User security and access control
Connection to existing data/datacenters
Use of automation and self-service
Confidential data and IP protection
Use of chargeback/showback
Business case justification
Alignment on standards, configurations,
SLAs, and data models
Ability to determine which workloads are
best served by which types of clouds
(% of respondents)

As Figure 11 shows, survey participants rank security and compliance processes (54%) as the
most critical enabler of their cloud strategies. The ability to monitor and enforce standard
SLAs and end-user experiences (40%) and the deployment of software-defined datacenter
technology and automation (37%) are also frequently identified as critical enabling processes
and technologies for cloud strategies. Organizations with commitments to hybrid cloud rated
software-defined datacenter technologies more highly than those without hybrid cloud
commitments.
FIGURE 11
Critical Cloud Enablers over the Next Five Years
Q. Which of the following technologies and processes are most critical to the successful execution of your
organization’s cloud strategy over the next five years?
Organizations that are committed to hybrid cloud are frequently ahead of the curve in
refining and adapting their security strategies. This is likely because they have a deeper
understanding of the role policies and automation play in enabling effective cloud operations.
As an example, in Figure 12, organizations with a commitment to hybrid cloud were
more likely to say they had made significant changes to the way they manage their cloud
infrastructure in the wake of large-scale and highly public security incidents such as the Target
data breach. United States–based participants were the most likely to say they were doing
things extremely differently.
n = 711
Notes:
sample sizes.
June 2014
54
40
37
37
32
32
30
Security and compliance processes
Ability to monitor and enforce standard SLAs
and end-user experience
Software-defined datacenter
technology/automation
Application programming interfaces (APIs)
Unified services catalog for
end-user self-service
Automation
Development and operations (DevOps)
(% of respondents)

A Regional View of Critical Hybrid Cloud Enablers
All regions agreed on security and compliance processes as the top enabler of their hybrid cloud strategies. Participants
based in the United States and Asia felt more strongly about the ability to monitor SLAs and the value of software-defined
datacenter technology and automation than did their counterparts in EMEA. Organizations in EMEA tend to
see networking and general automation as more important.
FIGURE D
Regional View of Top Cloud Enablers over the Next Five Years
Q. Which of the following technologies and processes are most critical to the successful execution of your organization’s cloud strategy
over the next five years?
Asia (n=230)
EMEA (n=354)
(% of respondents)
33
29
37
55
51
59
23
38
35
40
31
46
32
28
29
39
35
36
42
36
48
23
37
32
20
31
33
23
21
24
Security and compliance processes
Ability to monitor and enforce standard SLAs
Software-defined datacenter technology
Unified service catalog for self-service
provisioning
Application programming interfaces (APIs)
Networking
Storage
Automation
Development and operations (DevOps)
Open source

FIGURE 12
Hybrid Cloud Users React Rapidly to Security Concerns
Q. In the wake of incidents such as the Target data security breach and the Snowden infiltration of
government information systems, how differently are you managing your cloud infrastructure to satisfy
business and IT requirements?
Notes:
The Hybrid Cloud Imperative:
Collaborative Business And It Operations
Hybrid cloud environments will enable much more flexible, agile, and cost-effective IT
operations than traditional IT architectures. They will allow organizations of all sizes to quickly
scale resources and access new capabilities as needed. However, the success of this new
approach to computing demands a new approach to making decisions about technologies,
services providers, and day-to-day user support priorities.
IDC’s Hybrid Cloud Survey shows that to successfully execute a hybrid cloud strategy, IT and
business decision makers must collaborate and create new models for shared governance
across complex hybrid cloud environments (see Figure 13).
Hybrid cloud (n=456)
Non-hybrid (n=255)
Extremely different Somewhat different No effect
40
14
36
44
24
42
(% of respondents)

FIGURE 13
Collaboration Across Business and IT Becomes the Norm
Source: IDC, 2014
Worldwide, survey participants indicate that they see important long-term roles for central IT
to lead the charge related to IT infrastructure (defining, sourcing, and managing), application
development and test modernization, as well as big data and security in terms of identity and
access control. Line-of-business decision makers will lead compliance and risk management
initiatives with technical support from IT.
However, cloud-related decision making needs to be more collaborative, with business and
IT sharing tasks such as shaping the organization’s overall strategy and defining the core
configuration, compliance, and service standards that will govern day-to-day operation of the
hybrid environment. Business and IT decision makers will also need to take a collaborative
approach to the evaluation and selection of public cloud services and with regard to initiatives
related to business process automation, mobility, and end-user support.
Successful hybrid cloud strategies have the potential to transform business — their success
depends on collaboration and coordination across a broad base of business and IT stakeholders.

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