On Tuesday, EMC and VMware released a joint report titled "The State of IT Transformation," examining the IT strategies of 660 global customers. The report focused on IT initiatives in hybrid cloud, standardized services, and proper documentation.
Hybrid cloud was a top priority for respondents with more than 90% evaluating or testing proof of concept for a hybrid cloud deployment. Still, most hybrid cloud approaches are in the early stages, and the evaluations lack formality, with 91% of respondents lacking an organized method to evaluate hybrid cloud. Additionally, only 3% had evaluated their applications to see if they would work well in a hybrid cloud environment.
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The concept of hybrid cloud, or a mix of on-premises solutions with public and private cloud services, has been seeing tremendous growth in the enterprise. In late 2015, research firm MarketsandMarkets pegged hybrid cloud growth at a compound rate of 27%, putting its growth above the IT market as a whole.
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Around the same time, research firm Gartner's
Hype Cycle for hybrid cloud noted that, while it hasn't reached peak popularity, hybrid cloud could only be a few years out from mainstream adoption.
Another segment of business technology that the EMC and VMware report looked at was the shift of operating models toward an IT services-based approach. This, of course, would require the breaking down of silos, which 95% said was something they desired in their organization. Although, only 4% said that they had achieved this so far.
In pursuing that IT services approach, a specific set of skills in packing services and working with the cloud is needed, and 88% of respondents said that they had not begun developing those skills within their organization.
Additionally, offering such services often requires the use of a self-service portal or a catalog of services, of which 76% had neither. However, 77% said they wanted to provision their infrastructure resources quickly, in less than a day, but half of them still take between seven days and a full month to do so.
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Of course, plans for IT transformation are often made more efficient with proper documentation, and this is something that the survey respondents recognized. About 90% of companies said they felt that proper IT documentation was important, but only 39% currently had the documentation.
Application deployment was also a major point of the EMC and VMware report. In order to achieve the transformation mentioned in the report, most of the respondents surveyed said that they wanted to cut the release time for their application by 75%. Almost 70% currently take up to a year to complete the lifecycle of an application deployment. Still, only 18% said that they had access to the kind of application framework that could help them lower their deployment time.
The 3 big takeaways for TechRepublic readers
1. A recent report from EMC and VMware noted that hybrid cloud, packaged services, and application delivery are important to the future of IT transformation.
2. While most companies want to engage with these innovations, very few have actually taken steps to roll them out. For example, 90% are evaluating hybrid cloud, but only 3% know if their applications are suitable for hybrid cloud.
3. Provisioning infrastructure resources and deploying applications quickly is also critical, but many companies are still stuck in slow cycles. Enterprises should consider experimenting with lean and agile methodologies to improve these times.
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-state-of-it-cios-targeting-hybrid-cloud-and-packaged-services/?ftag=TREf7159e0&bhid=23212505082945924703844921727893