IT has evolved from running and maintaining traditional infrastructures, to a broader role of delivering new business outcomes. Enter Hybrid IT, which recognizes that where workloads run is just one small part of an entire IT infrastructure. More than just hybrid cloud, it's a strategy that blends cloud and non-cloud capabilities, including networks, end-points, and workloads with the best that cloud can offer in public IaaS and SaaS. Despite recent outages with public cloud, enterprises need to strike a balance.

We see hybrid IT as much bigger and broader than hybrid cloud or just running workloads -it's the way in which many enterprises are looking holistically at their IT strategy, whether it's adopting private and public cloud services to meet their unique business requirements or modernizing existing infrastructure. IDC findings show that cloud usage is rapidly rising and customers are embracing the fact that it is a hybrid IT world.

Source: IDC InfoBrief, sponsored by Cisco, Cloud Going Mainstream. All Are Trying, Some Are Benefiting; Few Are Maximizing Value. September 2016.

• 81% are evaluating or already using a public cloud.Some might use Azure for workloads that involve Microsoft technology, or Google platforms for workloads with TensorFlow or other machine-learning capabilities. They may also house data at Amazon as a default, for leveraging things like Lambda for serverless workloads. And then there are scenarios with select workloads where performance is critical, bandwidth is high, or there is very sensitive data involved in the on-prem data center.
• 73% of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy.The optimal cloud strategy for most enterprises is one that leverages the capabilities of webscale public cloud, but also on-prem private and hybrid cloud. Factoring the various types of workloads, location, performance, efficiency, and compliance requirements are also key.
• 84% will use multiple clouds.Many subscribe to multiple external cloud providers and run workloads using a mix of public/private cloud and dedicated IT capabilities. They want to be able to choose from multiple cloud providers based on location, policies, and governance needs.

CIOs we talk to want to solve business problems with complete, end-to-end IT architectures that extend from the data centers to campus networks, wireless, security capabilities, analytics capabilities, and even the end points. They are choosing which capabilities make the most sense to keep on-prem and which to expand to cloud, based on the outcomes they want to achieve. Hybrid IT is the new frontier when it comes to balancing the traditional infrastructure requirements with the need to expand new capabilities off-premise in the cloud.

Has your enterprise adopted a hybrid IT strategy? If not, what's holding you back?

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