Almost all Indian cos adopting varied forms of hybrid cloud: IBM

Only 3% of Indian enterprises reported using single private or public cloud in 2021, down from 29% in 2019 – establishing hybrid cloud as the dominant architecture, according to a report by IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) done in cooperation with Oxford Economics. 

The October study took in inputs from 7200 C-suite executes in 28 industries and 47 countries, with 287 of them in India.

The low number of enterprises using only a single cloud establishes the growing trend of hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments. With this also arises pain-points such as vendor lock-in, security, compliance and interoperability.

With varied reports citing the expulsion of cybercrime, surprisingly, more than a third of the Indian respondents did not indicate improvements to their cybersecurity posture as a key component of their business and IT investments.  

However, 80% of global respondents, including India, said data security had to be embedded throughout the cloud architecture and classified it as being important or extremely important. 54% cited that security concerns posed as significant obstacle to improving business performance.

“Today’s finding reiterate that security, governance and compliance tools must run across multiple clouds and be embedded throughout hybrid cloud architectures from the onset for digital transformations to be successful.” Said Howard Boville, Head of IBM Cloud Platform.

The reasons for the move to hybrid cloud is with workloads being portable with no vendor lock-in, with 79% of global respondents and 71% of India respondents citing the same.

68% and 63% of India respondents cited vendor lock-in and lack of interoperability as significant obstacles to improving business performance.

64% in India said that workloads being completely portable would help developers build, run and move workloads across private and public clouds.

The hybrid or multi cloud option also gave companies the flexibility to run governance and compliance tools across multiple clouds, with 74% saying it was important to the success of their digital initiatives