IT departments are responsible for managing their application portfolio. That portfolio is typically split into two categories: existing applications and new applications. For existing applications, customers may be responsible for managing costs and maintaining a reliable, secure environment that will keep an existing portfolio of applications extended through its logical lifespan. At the same time, they are prioritizing new built-in-the-cloud applications focused on differentiating their business from their competition. 

Customers have several choices they can make about how to support legacy applications in a dual portfolio, as shown in Figure 32. For example: 

• Customers can choose to maintain applications unchanged, but in an increasingly virtualized and enhanced environment; 
• They can also choose to move applications to the cloud and re-platform;
• They can refactor or rebuild applications for the cloud, build brand new applications in the cloud, or replace them with a set of SaaS applications. 

Figure 32.    Matching cloud strategies to the needs of each workload

For many organizations, this increasingly diverse application landscape can complicate IT functions. Over 93 percent of organizations now deploy their workloads across two or more clouds.^[6] This multicloud approach can become increasingly complex due to multiple operational silos, resulting from disparate management and operations tools, increasingly complex application and infrastructure life cycle management, ultimately delivering inconsistent service level agreements (SLAs). Solving this complexity is one of the biggest IT challenges.

Customer workload needs evolve, meaning customers starting with a private cloud may want to extend to a public cloud, or conversely bring their resources back on-premises. Various studies show that organizations want to use various cloud platforms across both public and private clouds. When ESG surveyed CIOs, 91 percent of respondents reported that their company’s cloud strategy would include on-premises data centers where many have found some workloads realize 2-4x savings compared to the public cloud alone. 

Customers want future proof cloud decisions and flexibility through a hybrid cloud strategy. To do so effectively, however, requires customers to simplify the multicloud complexity challenge. Customers value a hybrid cloud strategy, which addresses the biggest issue regarding extension across on-premises and off-premises, with 83 percent of customers stating that they value consistency of infrastructure from data center to cloud.^[7]

[6] IDC White Paper, sponsored by Cisco, Adopting Multicloud — A Fact-Based Blueprint for Reducing Enterprise Business Risks, June 2018

[7] VMware Cloud Market Study, January 2018