77% of IT Decision Makers Plan to Operate in Hybrid Cloud

SAN JOSE, Calif. — NetApp revealed findings from its survey assessing the adoption of hybrid cloud strategies and operational focus areas among its global enterprise customer base.

The survey of IT decision makers and infrastructure owners around the world found that 77% plan to operate their businesses in hybrid cloud environments for the foreseeable future in order to meet growing business demands for faster innovation, while optimizing operations and lowering infrastructure costs.

Highlights from NetApp’s 2021 Hybrid Cloud Enterprise Customer Adoption Survey include:

• The Future is Hybrid Cloud: More than three-quarters of respondents said their organization plans to operate a hybrid cloud environment for the foreseeable future, while only 17 percent expect their organization to eventually migrate all IT to the cloud. 
• Key Operational Drivers for Hybrid Cloud Adoption: Respondents indicated they are looking to improve infrastructure flexibility and scale (27 percent), as hybrid cloud designs help IT teams get access to the on-demand and emerging technologies offered by public cloud while still leveraging legacy systems running reliably on-premises. Nearly a quarter (21 percent) said they needed to optimize costs, while 13 percent said they needed to improve data accessibility.
• Data Protection Remains Top Priority with Other Use Cases Gaining Traction: Data protection (including disaster recovery, backup and archiving) was the most popular hybrid cloud use case selected with 29 percent stating they are either utilizing hybrid cloud for data protection today or plan to within 24 months. However, customer respondents indicated they are also leveraging hybrid cloud for production use cases more than anticipated: 20 percent said they are currently integrating both on-premises and cloud resources to support the same workload for hybrid production, with 17 percent planning to do so within 24 months.

“Speed is the new scale. IT leaders everywhere are accelerating digital transformation efforts, requiring more agility and flexibility to stay ahead of their competition and deliver immediate business impact,” said Ronen Schwartz, GM and SVP, Cloud Volumes at NetApp.