Applications Need Matching To The Right Cloud Environment

Given the differing strengths of available clouds, IT teams are now spending more time and attention on matching applications with the most relevant and capable environment, which in turn is driving hybrid cloud adoption. 

Businesses are fast discovering that workloads with predictable characteristics, such as the number of concurrent users, storage I/O requirements, and bandwidth consumption, often run most cost-effectively in a private cloud. This is because it’s fairly straightforward to forecast the requirements of predictable workloads and to plan accordingly to add resources to accommodate expected growth.

In contrast, unpredictable workloads, such as those supporting customer services or those that are seasonal in nature, often run best in the public cloud, which excels at IT resource elasticity to satisfy dynamic application requirements.

There is some wider evidence to support this trend. According to the Vanson Bourne, Enterprise Cloud Index, which surveyed cloud usage in 2018, the drive to optimize cloud operations by matching applications to the appropriate cloud environment is a likely factor in enterprise plans to increase hybrid cloud adoption. In 2018, 18 per cent of respondents to the study said they already used a hybrid cloud model, and that number is set to increase to 26 per cent in 12 months and to 41 per cent in 12 to 24 months' time among the research base.

Application mobility will be key in the future

But there is another factor at work here that will impact both the adoption of public and private clouds as well as the network mix to access them. Given the relative difficulty in moving enterprise-scale applications from one operating environment to another, the jump from 18 per cent to 41 per cent in two years’ time or less represents a significant increase in hybrid adoption, indicating the value of balancing applications across private/public cloud environments.

While 91 per cent of companies say that hybrid cloud is the ideal IT model for organisations, still more (97 per cent) say that greater mobility of the application between cloud environments is needed. This means businesses would like to see improvements in application mobility and interoperability among cloud environments for greater flexibility in matching applications to the most appropriate infrastructure.

While more hybrid cloud users in the Vanson Bourne study reported that all their needs were being met (49 per cent), versus those using a single public cloud (37 per cent), that same 97 per cent said that being able to move applications easily between cloud environments is a key requirement.

This is because there are several factors to consider and  enterprise IT teams decide where to run a given business application based on, among other things, the economics, regulatory compliance, performance, availability, and security of the available infrastructure options.