IT firms to increase expenditure on hybrid cloud to 49% by 2023: IBM

Businesses are set to increase their investments in hybrid multi-cloud platform strategies and capabilities to drive digital transformation, according to a study.

Computer hardware firm IBM’s research organisation, IBM Institute for Business Value, conducted the study with Oxford Economics from February through April 2020. They surveyed 6,000 executives globally, including 412 executives from India, across industries, job titles and geographies.

Organisations currently allocate 17% of their information technology (IT) spends for the cloud, the survey said. While the expenditure on hybrid cloud is set to increase from 42% to 49% by 2023, public cloud spending will be cut from 50% to 43%, it said. 

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A little over 30% of the IT executives surveyed said that cloud management platforms would improve their company’s visibility and control cloud costs. The respondents believe that the value derived from a full hybrid, multi-cloud platform technology and operating model at scale is 2.5 times higher than the value derived from a single platform, single cloud vendor approach.

While Indian organisations expect to use an average of 10 cloud platforms by 2023, only 29% of businesses have holistic multi-cloud management strategies in place, the report said.

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The adoption of cloud has been a central feature in developing new, digitally-driven business models, Viswanath Ramaswamy, vice president of IBM cloud and cognitive software services for India and South Asia, said. 

“Hybrid cloud enables an improved business performance and greater return on investment. In India, leading businesses such as Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea are achieving business transformation by leveraging hybrid multi-cloud platform technology and embedding AI,” he said.

Earlier this week, IT services firm Tech Mahindra launched a cloud operation and subscription management platform for enterprises. Last month, cloud computing firm Nutanix launched its hybrid cloud infrastructure Clusters on Amazon Web Services.