24 / 76
According to research from Cloudian, which polled
400 organizations in the U.K. and U.S., 28 percent of
businesses already use hybrid cloud storage, with a fur-
ther 40 percent planning to implement within the next
year. Only about a fifth (19 percent) have no plans to
adopt hybrid cloud storage at all.
The research further reveals that larger organizations
(2,500 employees or more) are adopting the approach
most rapidly, with 82 percent planning to deploy in the
next 12 months. This would tend to be intuitive: larger
organizations tend to have several characteristics that
smaller ones do not. First, they typically have more IT
staff and, thus, more opportunities to jump into what
might be considered new, cutting-edge, or less well-
understood technologies. Second, they often have more
complex needs than smaller companies and, thus, need
a wider variety of technologies at their disposal.
While data backup is the most popular use case (64
percent of respondents are reporting deployment or plans
to deploy to support their backup efforts), web infrastruc-
ture (52 percent), application dev/testing (48 percent) and
technical applications (43 percent) are also driving the
adoption of hybrid cloud storage products and services.
Decisions about whether to adopt hybrid cloud stor-
age are being driven by multiple factors. Cost and se-
curity are, by far, the key drivers in these decisions. In
some cases, the answer is to forgo the public cloud and
focus instead on building cloud-like storage architectures
in the local data center. When considering a hybrid cloud
storage strategy, concerns about interoperability between
on-premises and public cloud storage (40 percent) are
only exceeded by those around security (62 percent) and
cost (55 percent). Also, 76 percent of
respondents moving to hybrid cloud
storage have yet to decide which inter-
face to adopt.
Another influence is external and
internal data governance rules. About
59 percent of respondents report that
not all of their data can go to the pub-
lic cloud, and that more than half of
their data must remain onsite.
“Public cloud has made a huge im-
pact on the storage industry, and while
it’s the venue of choice for many data
types, at present, it’s not right for every-
one in every circumstance,” explained
Jon Toor, chief marketing officer, Cloud-
ian. “For those who need to keep spe-
cific data types on premises, a hybrid
approach can deliver the best of both
worlds, especially when their on-premis-
es and cloud storage technologies are
highly compatible with each other.”
Most commonly cited among the
data types that must remain on prem-
ises are financial data and customer
records. Reasons named most com-
monly are security, governance and
By
Tara
Seals
P
erhaps to no one’s surprise, the use
of hybrid cloud storage is expected to
accelerate rapidly during the next 12
months. That move, however, will be made
in order to support a variety of workloads.
24
Channel
Vision
|
January - February, 2017
“Although
the public
cloud is
enticing, there
remain technical,
security, cost
and regulatory
hurdles that can
be difficult
to overcome
for many.”
What’s InStore
for HybridCloud
Storage
Buyers Side