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Digital Transformation and Hybrid Cloud: Keys to Success

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

IT and business executives agree that digital transformation and the use of hybrid clouds are key to competitive success in the digital age, according to a new study conducted by IDG Research Services for EMC Corporation.

The study reveals that organizations must “think digital” to enhance customer experiences, increase flexibility, drive business opportunities, and decrease costs. With 92% of respondents stating that their organization’s competitive strategy calls for digital business initiatives and 90% calling digital business a “top priority” for the next one to three years, the transformative power of digital business is a key driver for IT today.

Drivers behind these digital technology investments include:

■ Improving the customer experience (87% of respondents indicated this was a critical or very important goal)

■ Acquiring new customers (86%)

■ Increasing innovation (82%)

■ Enabling real-time business decisions (82%)

The transformation to digital business is complex and takes time, but 63% of respondents indicated they are well on their way to achieving their initial digital transformation goals.

That said, IT leaders are still facing hurdles including:

■ Budget and resources (38%)

■ Fragmented computing environments (30%)

■ Lack of the right technologies (29%)

To solve these challenges, IT leaders are turning to hybrid cloud environments, embracing a modernized infrastructure that involves two or more delivery models, including a traditional data center, a private cloud, a managed private cloud and a public cloud.

83% of respondents currently use or plan to use a hybrid cloud environment, and 73% agree that a hybrid cloud model creates a path to digital business.

The survey data indicates that digital transformation enabled by hybrid cloud helps organizations increase IT agility and makes implementing digital business initiatives a faster, easier and less expensive process. Furthermore, survey results show that, by reducing IT costs, hybrid cloud enables investment in digital transformation, and the most aggressive hybrid cloud adopters are also the most advanced at digital transformation.

Of those surveyed, organizations with a significant number of hybrid cloud workloads are three times more likely than non-adopters to be approaching their digital business and infrastructure readiness goals.

Jeremy Burton, President, Products and Marketing, EMC Corporation, said: “Becoming digital is a priority for nearly every business on the planet. But how to get there is not as obvious. This study makes it perfectly clear that hybrid cloud – and the savings and agility it brings with it – is a key enabler to becoming a digital business.”

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

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For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

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Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

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Digital Transformation and Hybrid Cloud: Keys to Success

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

IT and business executives agree that digital transformation and the use of hybrid clouds are key to competitive success in the digital age, according to a new study conducted by IDG Research Services for EMC Corporation.

The study reveals that organizations must “think digital” to enhance customer experiences, increase flexibility, drive business opportunities, and decrease costs. With 92% of respondents stating that their organization’s competitive strategy calls for digital business initiatives and 90% calling digital business a “top priority” for the next one to three years, the transformative power of digital business is a key driver for IT today.

Drivers behind these digital technology investments include:

■ Improving the customer experience (87% of respondents indicated this was a critical or very important goal)

■ Acquiring new customers (86%)

■ Increasing innovation (82%)

■ Enabling real-time business decisions (82%)

The transformation to digital business is complex and takes time, but 63% of respondents indicated they are well on their way to achieving their initial digital transformation goals.

That said, IT leaders are still facing hurdles including:

■ Budget and resources (38%)

■ Fragmented computing environments (30%)

■ Lack of the right technologies (29%)

To solve these challenges, IT leaders are turning to hybrid cloud environments, embracing a modernized infrastructure that involves two or more delivery models, including a traditional data center, a private cloud, a managed private cloud and a public cloud.

83% of respondents currently use or plan to use a hybrid cloud environment, and 73% agree that a hybrid cloud model creates a path to digital business.

The survey data indicates that digital transformation enabled by hybrid cloud helps organizations increase IT agility and makes implementing digital business initiatives a faster, easier and less expensive process. Furthermore, survey results show that, by reducing IT costs, hybrid cloud enables investment in digital transformation, and the most aggressive hybrid cloud adopters are also the most advanced at digital transformation.

Of those surveyed, organizations with a significant number of hybrid cloud workloads are three times more likely than non-adopters to be approaching their digital business and infrastructure readiness goals.

Jeremy Burton, President, Products and Marketing, EMC Corporation, said: “Becoming digital is a priority for nearly every business on the planet. But how to get there is not as obvious. This study makes it perfectly clear that hybrid cloud – and the savings and agility it brings with it – is a key enabler to becoming a digital business.”

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...