The dynamic nature of most business environments can place conflicting requirements on IT teams. They’re working hard to find the resources to keep their businesses competitive, but they have to manage costs at the same time, all while supporting an increasingly diverse set of applications. More organizations are deploying hybrid cloud architectures to achieve these goals, but not all of them are succeeding. Many face challenges in bringing their on-premises environments up to the same level of agility they can achieve with their off-premises cloud resources. That imbalance can cause them to make trade-offs in workload placement, creating additional complexity in IT operations and limiting application development teams. Ensuring that the on-premises side of a hybrid environment is built on a foundation that can support the full range of possibilities that the modern business needs can be the differentiating factor in determining a successful outcome. Today’s infrastructure has to be able to support a much greater scale, velocity and diversity of applications to stay competitive.

• Modern infrastructure has to support a complex mix of applications.
• Competitive pressures require organizations to manage capacity flexibly and cost-effectively.
• Hybrid operational efficiency requires coordination across resource realms.
• On-premises infrastructure has to be able to perform as well as cloud to make hybrid models successful.
• Many are making the hybrid journey without a formal strategy, increasing complexity and cost.
• Reducing operational complexity is critical to achieving management effectiveness and efficiency for hybrid models.