How Decision-Makers Perceive Hybrid Cloud Benefits

Two-thirds of organizations implementing hybrid clouds gain competitive advantages from these environments, according to a new IBM global survey of 500 hybrid cloud decision-makers. These companies are nearly three times as likely to use hybrid clouds to turn their data into business assets or to monetize the data, and four times as likely to use it to launch new digital services. They also garner big business benefits, ranging from reduced costs and greater ROI to improved security and reduced shadow IT. Despite these benefits, the study, "Growing up Hybrid: Accelerating Digital Transformation," also finds that the move to hybrid cloud hasn't been easy. Challenges include the difficulty of integrating legacy IT and cloud environments, lack of internal skills to make the transition, and concerns with management complexity and security. This is where service providers can step in to help their customers move to a hybrid cloud infrastructure, leveraging their existing IT resources to get better control over their data to gain the benefits of a hybrid cloud environment. Here are key survey takeaways that show how adoption leaders are taking advantage of hybrid cloud environments.