This article is based on reporting originally published by cxotoday.com, citing research from Evaluator Group.
Enterprise IT Is Shifting Toward Hybrid Cloud
Cloud computing is fundamentally changing how enterprises design, manage, and evolve their IT infrastructure. What began as a SaaS-driven shift in application delivery has now moved deeper into the data center, with hybrid cloud emerging as a dominant architectural strategy for mid-to-large enterprises.
According to a survey of enterprise IT administrators conducted by Evaluator Group (published around 2017), 62 percent of respondents said hybrid cloud infrastructure is part of their long-term IT strategy, and 58 percent expected to increase their hybrid cloud workloads that year.
What Is Hybrid Cloud, Exactly?
John Webster, a senior partner at Evaluator Group, defines hybrid cloud as an IT architecture that integrates on-premises computing resources with off-premises public cloud resources. Importantly, he notes that this definition also encompasses multi-cloud architectures — environments where workloads are distributed across more than one public cloud provider alongside private or on-premises infrastructure.
For DevOps and infrastructure teams, this means hybrid cloud is not a single product or platform, but rather a design philosophy: keeping some workloads on-premises while leveraging public cloud elasticity for others.
Disaster Recovery: The Most Common Hybrid Cloud Use Case
Webster identifies disaster recovery (DR) as the most prevalent hybrid cloud use case among traditional enterprise users, with survey data suggesting uptake of over 80 percent among respondents using hybrid architectures for DR purposes.
The appeal is straightforward: hybrid architectures allow enterprises to spin up DR sites on demand, rather than maintaining costly dedicated secondary data centers that sit idle most of the time. This addresses three long-standing barriers to effective DR:
- Cost: Traditional DR required duplicate hardware and facilities. Public cloud turns DR capacity into an operational expense, paid only when needed.
- Complexity: Cloud-based DR tools and managed services reduce the operational burden on internal teams.
- Resource availability: On-demand cloud infrastructure removes the constraint of finite on-premises capacity during a recovery event.
“DR has long been a lagging capability because of cost, complexity, and availability of resources. Hybrid cloud removes some of those barriers to adoption.”
— John Webster, Senior Partner, Evaluator Group
Hybrid Cloud as a Transitional or Permanent Architecture
Webster draws a distinction between two different strategic positions enterprises take toward hybrid cloud:
- A permanent end state: Many organizations believe some portion of their applications will always remain on-premises due to regulatory requirements, latency constraints, data sovereignty rules, or legacy system dependencies. For these organizations, hybrid cloud is not a stepping stone — it is the destination.
- A transitional waypoint: For others, hybrid cloud is a bridge architecture — a way to incrementally migrate workloads to public cloud while keeping critical systems on-premises during the transition, with the eventual goal of shutting down private data centers entirely.
Webster acknowledges that the long-term trajectory is still uncertain. The viability of a permanent hybrid model depends on whether the operational complexity of managing workloads across environments remains manageable, and whether the ongoing costs of maintaining on-premises infrastructure stay economically justifiable.
What This Means for DevOps Teams
For DevOps and platform engineering teams, rising hybrid cloud adoption has concrete implications:
- Infrastructure-as-Code tooling must support both on-premises (e.g., VMware, bare metal) and cloud targets (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP) from a single pipeline.
- Observability and monitoring strategies need to span environments — a single pane of glass becomes critical when workloads are distributed.
- CI/CD pipelines should be designed with portability in mind, avoiding hard dependencies on environment-specific APIs where possible.
- Security and compliance posture must account for data moving between private and public environments, including encryption in transit, identity federation, and access control consistency.
- DR runbooks and automation should be tested regularly across the hybrid boundary to ensure cloud-based failover actually works under realistic conditions.
Key Takeaways
The Evaluator Group research reflects a broader industry consensus that was forming in the late 2010s: hybrid cloud is not a niche strategy but a mainstream enterprise architecture. Disaster recovery remains the gateway use case, offering a clear cost-benefit justification with relatively low organizational risk. From there, enterprises expand hybrid workloads incrementally, guided by economics, compliance requirements, and operational maturity.
Whether hybrid cloud proves to be a permanent model or a transition mechanism, engineering teams that build skills in cross-environment automation, networking, and observability will be well positioned regardless of where the industry lands.