Hybrid cloud must evolve to reach true digital transformation promise

Hybrid cloud must evolve to realise true digital transformation promise, new research has revealed

Enterprise cloud management firm CloudBolt Software has unveiled the findings of a global survey of IT leaders from a range of industries. The inaugural Industry Insights report, "The Truth About Hybrid Cloud and Digital Transformation, conducted in partnership with Pulse, showed widespread agreement on several key issues related to digital transformation.

Survey respondents included directors, VPs, and other executive titles among IT professionals across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC.

In the survey, 94% of respondents agreed that hybrid cloud is critical to digital transformation. Specifically, they cited three top initiatives most critical for DX through hybrid cloud: enabling self-service IT, accelerating automation initiatives, and optimising cloud spend.

In these areas, the majority of IT leaders also agree that there are specific challenges that currently exist in todays approaches.

More than half (56%) believe that their self-service IT is too difficult, requiring expertise in clouds and infrastructure tools, while 76% still rely on some form of custom coding when it comes to integrating different tools to advance their IT automation initiatives.

The report found 78% lack the visibility necessary to optimise cloud deployments, while 54% of respondents say they lack automated ways to optimise cloud costs.

The good news is IT leaders have a clear understanding of what they need to move forward when it comes to self-service IT, automation acceleration, and cloud cost management, according to the report

It found 71% want self-service IT to be a true easy button, without the need for end-users to understand underlying cloud-native tools and technologies, while 62% want integration approaches that don't require deep domain knowledge or special expertise typically found in custom coding projects.

With cloud cost management, 56% want the ability to continuously notify stakeholders of cost overruns and automated methods for optimisation.

"The industry clearly understands the value that hybrid cloud plays in digital transformation, especially around the importance of areas like self-service IT, automation, and cost optimisation," says CloudBolt chief executive officer Jeff Kukowski.

"Unfortunately, although the industry has focused on these pillars of cloud management for a decade, they struggle to make them a reality," he says.

"Our research indicates the need for a new approach if leaders want to achieve their digital transformation goals."

The findings mark the launch of an ongoing research series dedicated to providing timely, actionable, and essential hybrid cloud technology trends and insights. While the focus of this study was digital transformation, future instalments, to be delivered two to three times annually, will drill down into issues surrounding DevOps, cloud operations, security, and governance.

The goal is to provide IT leaders with continuous insight into broader industry trends, allowing them to benchmark their own progress as well as identify solutions to common challenges faced by their peers.

"IT leaders are hungry for knowledge," says CloudBolt chief marketing officer Grant Ho.

"Although there are some very broad annual surveys available, there is nothing that addresses the seemingly intractable issues that IT leaders have to deal with when trying to drive cloud adoption," he says.

"With this series, we hope to remedy that and give IT leaders some actionable insights they can use to progress on their digital transformation journey."