For a recently published Thought Leadership paper commissioned by Intel titled “Enable Developers in a Hybrid Cloud World,” Forrester Consulting conducted research that underscores the importance of building a hybrid cloud strategy to benefit developers. The bottom line, according to the Forrester paper, is that empowering fast, agile innovation via hybrid cloud is no longer a luxury that you can ignore; it is a must-have to remain competitive.
It is clear from Forrester’s survey results that hybrid cloud is here to stay: the majority (58 percent) of North American and European infrastructure decision-makers whose firms use public cloud have a hybrid strategy in place to drive innovation, maximize cost efficiencies and allow operations teams to choose the best environment for each workload. 42 percent plan to migrate more core traditional business applications to cloud platforms and 40 percent plan to build more new applications in the cloud in the next two years.
This preference for cloud is no surprise. As application development principles change to facilitate faster delivery while maintaining quality, cloud has become an essential component of modern development initiatives. And, companies adopting a DevOps model find that hybrid cloud is the perfect solution – allowing developers to gain speed, agility, flexibility of public cloud while being able to use on-premises tools and infrastructure to manage critical workloads.
In fact, application developers have been one of the earliest adopters of hybrid cloud, appreciating rapid access to infrastructure (compute, storage and network) and the ability to scale up (and down) at will. Forrester’s survey reveals that three-quarters of the developers surveyed use hybrid cloud for testing environments and are increasingly turning to hybrid cloud for development as well.
The insights revealed in Forrester’s paper apply to every forward-thinking company, regardless of industry, as software is becoming a central aspect of doing business. That’s why establishing a hybrid cloud strategy tuned to developers’ needs is crucial when it comes to enabling DevOps to meet increasingly complex software requirements.
By allowing your developers the freedom to experiment and innovate through the use of hybrid cloud, you can keep them happy (and attract the best talent in the industry). And with the hybrid cloud market expecting to grow at a compound annual rate of 22.5 percent between 2016 and 20211 it means there will be more tools available to facilitate this.
Embracing both DevOps and hybrid cloud with a robust management solution allows developers to have access to the tools that they need across environments while maintaining governance and reducing shadow IT. As explained in their paper, Forrester found that hybrid cloud is the preferred configuration to provide developers with a choice regarding both tools and workloads. Further, today’s management and orchestration tools – along with current development best practices – allow IT to maintain speed, performance, and governance regardless of platform.
To learn more about building synergy between hybrid cloud adoption and DevOps, including key recommendations for setting your application developers up for success, be sure to read the Forrester Consulting Thought Leadership paper, “Enable Developers in a Hybrid Cloud World.”