Modernizing IT environments is not a matter of if, but when. A large majority of enterprises (80%) are pursuing a hybrid cloud strategy in which on- and off-premises IT environments work productively together, according to a recent 451 Research Voice of the Enterprise (VotE) survey of IT decisionmakers. While this is largely aspirational — the nirvana of applications operating seamlessly across heterogeneous environments is still a work in progress — organizations that seize the opportunity to modernize their environments and give application developers and IT operations teams a shared, business-oriented data platform will have a head start.
As enterprises move IT resources from traditional environments to modern hybrid and multicloud infrastructure, many have already identified applications they could migrate quickly and cost-effectively with a lift-andshift approach. Employee productivity suites, data analytics and customerfacing functions have largely moved out of the datacenter and into mature SaaS and platform offerings.