40% of Australian organisations adopt hybrid cloud

Around 40% of Australian organisations have commenced a hybrid cloud journey, and this is expected to increase to 49% over the next 12–18 months, according to Microsoft research.

Currently, 43% of Australian respondents to a survey by the company are only using private cloud technologies and 17% are using purely public cloud resources.

Respondents are not likely to increase their investments in private or public cloud-only adoption, with resources shifting towards the hybrid model.

But the study also indicates that Australians have a more conservative attitude to the cloud compared to their APAC peers.

While 74% of Australian respondents said they would be comfortable hosting all their business applications on the public cloud in the future, more than half are using it for only basic applications such as email and website hosting, and just 38% are using the cloud for application development and operations.

“Hybrid cloud is a natural progression for all organisations, regardless of size, to reach their digital ambition,” Microsoft Australia’s Azure product manager, Mike Heald, said.

“It’s a tough balancing act for IT to manage both current and future digital needs of the business. The cloud holds rich new applications, which will enable better management tools, intelligent applications and advanced analytics to not just reduce cost and increase efficiency but to also innovate and enable faster time to market. As such, it can’t be ignored but it needs to be managed.”

Accordingly, 67% of Australian respondents agree that there is a need to invest more in IT security products and services, and 62% agree on the need to reduce complexity in managing their ever-growing portfolio of IT security assets.

Image courtesy of NEC Corporation of America under CC