Taneja Blog Hybrid and Multi Cloud is Real, and Will Increasingly Be Supporting Production Use Cases

By Jeff Byrne, Senior Analyst & ConsultantWhen it comes to the architecture IT leaders are betting on for the future, Hybrid Cloud is the clear choice. In a recent Taneja Group survey of 370 end-user organizations, two-thirds of respondents indicated that Hybrid Cloud is their architecture for the future. In most cases this hybrid cloud vision includes a plan for deploying workloads to multiple public clouds, in addition to maintaining an on-premises footprint, most often for a core of business-critical apps. The on-prem data center of tomorrow may be shrinking, but for an overwhelming majority of companies, it won't be going away.Figure 1 below shows the overall response. Only one out of six companies favor a public cloud-only approach, while a similar percentage plan to keep their workloads solely on premises.What types of storage use cases are companies deploying or planning to deploy in a hybrid cloud? Secondary data use cases such as backup, archive and DR are dominant today, along with dev/test. But the mix will be shifting significantly in the years ahead.As the results in Figure 2 illustrate, secondary data use cases will continue to migrate to the cloud in the near future. But primary data use cases will also increase in importance during that time. Four out of ten companies plan in the next two years to "lift and shift" at least some of their application data to cloud compute, an increase of 30+% over today. Even more compellingly, more than one-quarter of the survey population plans to move at least some of their primary app storage in the cloud, a greater than 2x increase over current deployments.What do these research insights mean for your organization? If you're not already running at least some secondary data use cases in the cloud, you're in the minority. And unless your internal policies or industry regulations prevent it, you should be ramping up your use of the cloud for backup, archiving and DR right now, to take advantage of cloud agility and economics.Beyond that, think about how the public or hybrid cloud can benefit selected primary apps and the data that support them. If your organization is not driven by a "cloud first" mandate, you should still consider following a "cloud appropriate" approach, thinking about what new apps will benefit from being born in the cloud.