Top reasons why most companies choose a mix of cloud services and privately owned data centers

Hybrid infrastructures, a mix of public cloud services and privately owned data centers, have become the major architecture in the enterprise environment. Most companies choose to virtualize more hardware by substituting it with less expensive and more versatile software, as shown in a Bitdefender survey of more than 500 IT decision makers. US IT decision makers say hybrid environments allow more flexibility and room for expansion, while they also increase productivity and security. 

Most US respondents even place security as their third-most important argument for migrating to the cloud (53%), far more than Germans (36%) and Britons (37%). Cost-effectiveness is one of the top three reasons mentioned by IT decision makers from enterprises in the UK and Germany.

US companies choose hybrid infrastructures for their greater flexibility and room for expansion (55%), increased productivity (54%), superior storage capacity (47%), and lower costs (46%).

Companies that have heavily invested in their own private data centers are the first to embrace the hybrid approach. A Bitdefender report published in December, 2016 shows most companies have experienced cloud security incidents such as lack of visibility (51%), a lack of policies (41%) and potential access by unauthorized devices (34%). Gartner recently predicted that the cloud will most commonly be used in a hybrid manner by 2020, and emphasized that purely off-cloud operations will largely disappear by the end of the decade. The advisory company estimates that, by 2019, new software investments of more than 30 of the 100 largest vendors will have shifted from cloud-first to cloud-only.

Half of IT decision makers in the US see cloud as more secure than on-premise infrastructure, while the majority in Germany and the UK trust their own data centers most, a recent Bitdefender survey shows. In-house infrastructures are often favored for allowing greater company control than with external solutions.

By 2025, some 80% of corporate data centers will disappear as the cloud becomes the primary deployment for information technology, according to recent predictions. The hybrid approach of blending the cloud and the data center has already become a reality. According to researcher MarketsandMarkets, the hybrid cloud market is growing far faster than the overall IT market and will achieve compound annual growth of 27% until 2019. The market is expected to surpass $50-billion this year, double the $25 billion registered in 2014. Analysts expect the hybrid cloud market to reach $85 billion in 2019. 

Methodology

This survey, conducted in October 2016 by iSense Solutions for Bitdefender, included 503 IT security purchase professionals from enterprises with 1,000+ PCs based in the US, the UK and Germany. Half of the respondents originate from the United States, while 153 are from the UK and 100 from Germany. Some 62 percent of organizations surveyed in the US have over 3,000 employees, while 14 percent have between 2,000 and 2,999 and 24 percent employ between 1,000 and 1,999. Some 44 percent of the organizations surveyed in the UK have over 3,000 employees, while 21 percent have between 2,000 and 2,999 and 35 percent employ between 1,000 and 1,999. In Germany, almost half of the organizations surveyed have over 3,000 employees, while 6 percent have between 2,000 and 2,999 and 45 percent between 1,000 and 1,999