Managing a Hybrid Cloud: An Overview

The hybrid cloud market is on a high, with businesses discovering its many benefits. Let's explore what it entails to adopt such a cloud model and why an organisation should consider moving to it.

- Dr Gopala Krishna Behara

Enterprises aim at competitive advantage through process agility and innovative business models at low costs. Cloud solutions provide the much-needed flexibility to enterprises to develop the capabilities necessary to innovate and seize new business opportunities. Businesses look at a better customer experience, business agility and flexibility, a reduction in hardware and IT staffing expenditure, and improved security, among other things when they decide to shift to the cloud.

According to a report by Allied Market Research, the hybrid cloud market was valued at US$ 96.7 billion in 2023, and is estimated to reach US$ 414.1 billion by 2032, growing at a CAGR of 17.2% between 2024 and 2032. Gartner predicts that by 2025 enterprises will spend more on public cloud services than traditional IT solutions. As per IDC, by 2025, 85% of organisations will see a 35% increase in sustainable efficiencies by using software and cloud-based infrastructures. And according to a Delvens report, the global hybrid cloud market size was estimated at US$ 96.2 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach US$ 278.51 billion in 2030 at a CAGR of 16.4% during the forecast period 2023-2030.

CIOs across industries are busy working with multiple cloud providers, essentially to retain what works and check what to improve across the enterprise cloud estate. One of the fundamental decisions they need to make is how to balance the onsite, remote, public and private elements of that combination. CIOs need to derive a strategy to adopt emerging technologies to provide more business value than before. Interestingly, security concerns regarding adoption of public cloud providers are falling while those regarding vendor lock-in are increasing. Enterprises do not want to put all their eggs in one cloud provider’s basket to minimise their dependency on it.