Cloud computing is gaining ground in the enterprise since it allows businesses to concentrate on their core competencies rather than on IT. As cloud becomes more popular, organizations are focusing on hybrid strategies that combine on-premise and cloud capabilities, industry research shows. However, data integration and security remain concerns.
IT organizations are seeking cost efficiencies by virtualizing, standardizing, and developing hybrid cloud infrastructures.
Most organizations want to have a hybrid cloud architecture for their production applications within the next 18–24 months, with 90% reporting that they are in the evaluation or proof of concept stage
Source: EMC-VMware “State of IT Transformation Report,” March 2016
Cloud offerings enable corporate and public organizations to focus on their core competencies, as opposed to IT.
Spending on IT infrastructure for cloud environments will grow at a 12.5% 5-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) to $57.8 billion in 2020. This will represent 47.9% of the total spending on enterprise IT infrastructure in 2020. Within the cloud segment, spending on public and private cloud IT infrastructure will experience CAGRs of 13.8% and 10.2%, respectively.
Source “IDC Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker,” April 2016
IT professionals must balance the need for greater efficiency enabled by cloud services while also ensuring that critical systems, databases, and applications remain secure.
The top three benefits are:
- Infrastructure cost reduction
- Increased infrastructure flexibility
- Relieving internal IT personnel of the routine infrastructure responsibilities
Source: SolarWinds’ “IT Trends Report 2016: The Hybrid IT Evolution,” March 2016
While ETL and data replication still rank as the most prevalent methods applied to data integration, new strategies and techniques are also coming to the fore, providing more choices to enterprises that need to manage and share data across systems.
The top current data integration approaches are:
- ETL
- Data replication
- Networked databases
- Common data storage
- Cloud-based integration solutions/platforms
- Manual scripting
Source: “2015 IOUG Data Integration for Cloud Survey,” produced by Unisphere Research and sponsored by Oracle
Hybrid environments are dominant in the enterprise although the combination of on-premise and cloud applications increases the complexity, velocity, and volume of data.
Percentage of organizations that are currently not satisfied with their ability to sync data between cloud and on-premise systems: 59%
Source: “Connectivity in the Enterprise: The Rise of Cloud and Its Integration Challenges,” from Scribe Software in partnership with Spiceworks, October 2015
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