Cloud computing, overall, is now well-established as a viable, even essential, element in how organizations use technology to achieve business goals. Challenges such as meeting the needs of users, deploying solutions to business needs faster and increasing demands on badly stretched internal IT teams are driving the discussion and adoption surrounding cloud computing, and hybrid cloud respectively.
Below, I’ll discuss information from a recent Tech Target whitepaper on the business drivers of the Cloud overall, as well as the challenges your customers are facing as they adopt the Hybrid Cloud.
Business Drivers and Customer Challenges
The move to cloud computing is being driven by a number of substantive challenges that are forcing business and IT leaders alike to look for new solutions. These include:
- Budget constraints. Business executives are looking to trim what have traditionally been double-digit spending increases in IT capital budgets.
- Shadow IT. Many business stakeholders, frustrated by elongated application and deployment cycles, have started to go around the IT organization and begun to act as their own IT departments through such solutions as public clouds, inexpensive virtualization approaches and using their own consumer devices to access corporate data and services.
- Internal staff constraints. Not only have organizations put a brake on IT hiring, there often are fewer in-house specialists to handle unique technology or applications requirements.
- Need to preserve existing on-site infrastructure investments.
We’ve discussed the business drivers and customer challenges above for the cloud overall, but Hybrid cloud, however, has its own set of business drivers that stem from important customer challenges. For instance, IT infrastructure inside most organizations has evolved in a largely patchwork, often ad hoc manner, with disparate and even incompatible systems springing up over time to accomplish tasks that had once been isolated, but now need to be integrated.
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