Hybrid Cloud Computing: Why It Remains the Biggest IT Management Challenge

This article is based on reporting originally published at itbusinessedge.com. Survey data cited below comes from IDC, Syncsort, Insight Enterprises, and Nutanix research referenced in that reporting.

The Hybrid Cloud Promise vs. Reality

Cloud computing was supposed to lower the cost of IT. For many organisations, the opposite has happened. Operating multiple cloud platforms in parallel with existing on-premises infrastructure has introduced a new layer of operational complexity — and with it, unexpected expense. IT leaders who thought they were trading capital expenditure for predictable operational costs are discovering that managing a fragmented multi-cloud estate can cost more than the environments it was meant to replace.

This tension is the defining IT management challenge of the current era, and understanding its root causes is the first step toward addressing it.

The Multi-Cloud Reality: Adoption Without Integration

Research from International Data Corp. (IDC) illustrates the scale of the problem. According to the survey cited in the original reporting:

• 64% of customers are already using multiple clouds.
• Only 24% have achieved a high degree of interoperability between those cloud environments.
• Another 40% report low interoperability between their clouds.
• Just 7% have built a true hybrid cloud — one in which multiple IT environments are managed through a single control plane.

That last figure is the critical one. Managing disparate cloud and on-premises environments in isolation from each other drives up operational overhead significantly. Without a unified management layer, teams end up context-switching between platforms, duplicating monitoring tooling, and applying inconsistent security and governance policies.

Ad-Hoc Migration Is Driving Up Costs

A separate survey of 900 IT professionals conducted by Syncsort (a provider of data management software) reveals a related problem: most organisations lack a coherent cloud strategy.

• Only 29% of IT organisations have a centralised strategy and a centre of excellence for proactively planning and managing cloud migrations.
• 42% admit they migrate applications to the cloud on an ad-hoc basis.
• 57% report that management costs exceeded expectations.
• 62% identified data and application migration costs as a significant challenge.

Syncsort CTO Tendü Yoğurtçu points to lift-and-shift migrations as a common culprit: organisations move legacy applications to the cloud without re-architecting them, and then discover that cloud unit economics do not favour workloads designed for static, on-premises hardware. The result is a cloud bill that surprises finance teams and undermines the business case for migration.

“They lift and shift applications to the cloud. But costs are higher than expected.”

— Tendü Yoğurtçu, CTO, Syncsort

Cloud Fundamentals Are Still Not Solved

Even with years of cloud adoption behind them, many IT organisations are still working through foundational questions. A survey of 200 IT executives commissioned by Insight Enterprises identifies four major hurdles to cloud implementation:

• Determining which workloads should move to the cloud — cited by 72% of respondents.
• Need for new tools to support and monitor cloud applications — 70%.
• Internal resistance to change — 70%.
• Choosing the right cloud deployment model — 69%.

Despite these obstacles, 75% of organisations surveyed have a “cloud-first” policy for new workloads. But only 45% have a cloud-only strategy, with 30% adopting what they describe as a “cloud priority” approach — signalling that many are retaining significant on-premises footprints by design rather than by inertia.

Steve Zipperman, general manager for cloud consulting services at Insight Enterprises, frames the core principle simply:

“It’s all about the workload. Not every workload can be deployed in a private cloud.”

— Steve Zipperman, General Manager, Cloud Consulting Services, Insight Enterprises

DevOps Adoption Is Happening in Silos

Cloud transformation almost always requires organisations to modernise their internal delivery processes, and DevOps adoption is central to that effort. However, Zipperman notes that in most organisations this transition is occurring in isolated pockets rather than as a coordinated, enterprise-wide programme. Teams in one business unit may be operating mature CI/CD pipelines while others still rely on manual change management processes.

This uneven adoption creates inconsistency in how applications are built, deployed, and operated across environments — which in turn makes unified hybrid cloud management harder to achieve. Broad, organisation-wide DevOps maturity is likely still several years away for most enterprises.

The Hybrid Cloud Is the Agreed Destination

Despite the implementation challenges, the industry has largely converged on hybrid cloud as the target architecture. A survey of 2,300 IT professionals published by Nutanix (a provider of hyper-converged infrastructure software) finds that 91% of respondents identify the hybrid cloud as their ideal IT model. The top driver — cited by 97% — is the desire to move applications freely between cloud environments.

That flexibility is, in essence, a cost-control strategy. Organisations want the leverage to shift workloads between cloud providers based on price, performance, or compliance requirements — playing providers off one another rather than being locked in to a single platform’s pricing model.

Cloud Cost Optimisation Tooling Matures

A category of cloud cost optimisation tooling has emerged to help organisations right-size their cloud spending. These tools analyse consumption patterns, identify idle or over-provisioned resources, and — increasingly — apply machine learning to recommend or automate rightsizing decisions.

Consolidation is already underway in this space. As one example cited in the original reporting, Apptio (a provider of IT cost management tools) acquired FittedCloud, a cloud optimisation platform using machine learning algorithms. Apptio CEO Sunny Gupta describes the goal as allowing organisations to right-size workloads dynamically rather than relying on periodic manual reviews:

“IT organizations want to be able to right-size workloads in real time.”

— Sunny Gupta, CEO, Apptio

This points to a broader trend: as hybrid cloud environments grow in complexity, the tooling required to manage them is becoming a competitive market of its own.

How Major Vendors Are Responding to Hybrid Cloud Demand

The scale of enterprise demand for hybrid cloud management has not been lost on the major platform vendors. Several significant strategic moves reflect this:

• IBM and Red Hat: IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat (valued at approximately $34 billion at the time of reporting) was positioned explicitly around enabling hybrid cloud strategies, leveraging Red Hat’s open-source middleware and OpenShift Kubernetes platform.
• AWS Outposts: At AWS re:Invent 2018, Amazon Web Services announced plans to deliver AWS-managed infrastructure for on-premises environments — effectively extending the AWS control plane into customer data centres.
• Google and Anthos: Google moved to extend its cloud reach by enabling Kubernetes workloads to run on VMware infrastructure in on-premises environments, the initiative that would become Google Anthos.
• Microsoft Azure: Microsoft has promoted Azure Arc and Azure Stack as mechanisms for running Azure services consistently across cloud and on-premises deployments.
• VMware and Dell Technologies: VMware — and its parent Dell Technologies — have pursued a strategy of extending the VMware management plane into multiple public clouds, arguing that organisations with existing VMware investments can achieve hybrid cloud without replacing their on-premises management tooling.

“IT organizations are looking for ways to rationalize the management of multiple clouds. All the cloud savings are being eaten up by increased operational costs.”

— Matt Baker, SVP Strategy and Planning, Dell EMC

Practical Takeaways for IT and DevOps Teams

The pattern across all of this research and vendor activity points to a set of actionable principles for teams navigating hybrid cloud adoption:

1. Start with workload classification. Not every application benefits from the cloud. Assess workloads for cloud suitability before migrating, rather than defaulting to lift-and-shift.
2. Avoid ad-hoc migration. Establish a cloud centre of excellence — even a small one — to bring consistency and governance to migration decisions.
3. Prioritise a single management plane. The organisations achieving the most interoperability are those managing multiple environments through unified tooling. Evaluate platforms that span your entire estate rather than deploying separate tools per cloud.
4. Instrument cost from day one. Cloud cost optimisation is significantly easier when tagging, cost allocation, and budget alerting are in place before workloads are deployed.
5. Expand DevOps practices organisation-wide. Siloed DevOps adoption creates inconsistency that compounds the complexity of multi-cloud operations. Treat cultural and process change as equal in importance to tooling.
6. Plan for portability. Architect applications to be portable between environments where possible, using container orchestration and abstraction layers to avoid deep platform-specific coupling.

Conclusion

The hybrid cloud is not a future state — it is already the operational reality for most enterprise IT organisations. The challenge is that the majority are managing it reactively, with fragmented tooling, inconsistent processes, and costs that continue to exceed projections. Closing the gap between multi-cloud sprawl and a genuinely managed hybrid environment requires deliberate strategy, unified management tooling, and organisation-wide process maturity. The vendors are building the platforms; the harder work is internal.