The recent pandemic upped the ante on IT modernization as most organizations accelerated cloud deployments to support workforces that distributed overnight. Now as we emerge on the other side, many enterprises are reexamining their workload deployments in the face of escalating cloud costs. Indeed, Gartner® predicts that “by 2027, 85 percent of the workload placements made until 2022 will no longer be optimal, due to changing requirements.”1 As enterprises pursue more agile, mobile, and portable applications, IT leaders need to make quick decisions about where to house their workloads and, in so doing, reevaluate their cloud strategy.

As organizations are rethinking their infrastructure strategy, they are looking to leverage new opportunities and innovations to gain agility, simplify management, drive operational efficiencies, and better equip their IT teams with the resources and skills needed to be competitive, all while keeping costs in check. The options are overwhelming. And if placing 100 percent of your workloads in the public cloud isn’t the answer, what is?

IT workload environments aren’t “one size fits all.” Many IT leaders are finding success with hybrid IT infrastructure, where applications and data are spread and shared across a combination of on-premises, colocation, and public cloud environments, based on the unique characteristics, resource utilization, performance specifications, and security requirements of each application. Hybrid IT strategies offer a host of benefits, not the least of which is that IT leaders regain control of their data, making it easier to support a remote workforce, scale their operations, increase agility, and protect critical assets, all while being cost-efficient.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Philip Sellers