Hybrid cloud will take on greater importance during 2018, enabling added hybrid adoption growth.
Beancounters at analyst Technology Business Research (TBR) have added up some numbers and divided them by their shoe size and penned a report with the catchy title “2018 Cloud & Software Predictions: The only known certainties — Death, taxes and changes in the cloud market.”
The report found that the key driver for the development is the increasing complexity of cloud environments and integration.
The report stated that management headaches related to cloud implementations have been growing as the scale and scope of solutions expands, and integration across clouds and on-premise environments undoubtedly magnifies these challenges.
“While the desire for solutions that can be portable, fully integrated and flexibly delivered has never been higher, the management of workloads being implemented into sprawling hybrid environments will remain the bottleneck for how much additional hybrid adoption will occur in 2018”, the report said.
“In addition to driving innovation at the tools and platforms level, the hybrid will increase demand for services engagements. The skills needed to deploy and manage hybrid solutions, from technology and complexity perspectives, are distinct issues that customers need to address as part of their hybrid implementation.”
Customers not only have to grapple with how to manage and control cloud solutions within their organisations and manage cloud solutions at scale and during integration with other IT assets.
“For these reasons, cloud vendors, and more importantly, their services partners, will play a critical role in the successful implementations of hybrid solutions and broader hybrid environments for their joint end customers.”
The majority of customers looking to include services as part of their hybrid implementations also seek to engage with partners from the start. Of the customers TBR surveyed as part of its Hybrid Cloud Customer Research, 52 percent indicated they are working with an SI or broker to complete their initial hybrid purchases.
TBR some attributes that must be inherent in hybrid included being a multivendor and integrated solution.
“Similarly, it must meet customer objectives to create cohesive environments to share data across elements to promote those much-desired strategic business initiatives and outcomes.
“Due to the increasing complexity of hybrid environments and the need for customisation, partners that can integrate multivendor solutions will be highly sought after in hybrid purchasing cycles,” the report said.
