Skip to main content

Hybrid Management is Key Challenge

Hybrid IT is becoming a standard enterprise model, but there’s no single playbook to get there, according to a new report by Dimension Data entitled The Success Factors for Managing Hybrid IT.

Looking at the top motivators to move to hybrid IT by country, Hong Kong, UK and US companies highlighted end-user demand most often, while respondents in France, Singapore and South Africa most often noted cost. Malaysian firms listed hiring challenges, and German firms mentioned limited data center capacity as the most common motivating factors.

The report also shows that management of the hybrid IT environment (41 percent of respondents) is one of the top three challenges in deployment.

Dimension Data Group CEO, Jason Goodall said: “With data and processes shifting across multiple cloud and non-cloud environments, a new approach to management is called for. IT managers are under tremendous pressure to seek new ways to manage and secure multiple IT environments in an effective manner. Automation is important because it helps reduce the operating costs, as well as the pain caused by the growing complexity of business processes and management tasks. It is simply no longer appropriate or cost-effective for these tasks to be done manually.”

Data migration was another common deployment challenge, with 44 percent of the respondents saying they found it challenging to determine which option is the best for a particular workload and to migrate workloads to new locations.

While 38 percent of enterprises surveyed claimed that they use automation to accelerate application migration, 48 percent said that migration at their company is manual and labor-intensive or that they use in-house resources. Today’s application and data migration remains complex and expensive for most organizations.

According to Kelly Morgan, Research VP, Services at 451 Research, managed services have become a key component of service delivery across a range of infrastructure and application products.

“Service providers that can offer a comprehensive portfolio of managed services across the broadest set of infrastructure options are well positioned to meet the full set of enterprise cloud requirements,” said Morgan.

Other highlights in the report include:

■ Despite concerns about security, compliance, and integration issues, organizations are embracing next-generation networking technologies such as SDN and network functions virtualization.

■ Enterprises are using innovative/emerging technologies such as containers, big data solutions and software-defined networking (SDN) in productions scenarios.

■ Enterprises are spending a significant portion of their IT budgets with third-party service providers on managed and professional services for various reasons – to lower cost, to free IT staff to focus on other projects, to improve security, and to provide specialized technical expertise. The research reveals that 41 percent of organizations work with multiple vendors and manage them themselves, and another 37 percent work with a single vendor that can offer a broad range of products and services which it builds and manages.

The research involved 1,500 IT decision makers from multiple vertical industries across the US, Europe, Asia-Pacific and South Africa.

Hot Topics

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 ...

Hybrid Management is Key Challenge

Hybrid IT is becoming a standard enterprise model, but there’s no single playbook to get there, according to a new report by Dimension Data entitled The Success Factors for Managing Hybrid IT.

Looking at the top motivators to move to hybrid IT by country, Hong Kong, UK and US companies highlighted end-user demand most often, while respondents in France, Singapore and South Africa most often noted cost. Malaysian firms listed hiring challenges, and German firms mentioned limited data center capacity as the most common motivating factors.

The report also shows that management of the hybrid IT environment (41 percent of respondents) is one of the top three challenges in deployment.

Dimension Data Group CEO, Jason Goodall said: “With data and processes shifting across multiple cloud and non-cloud environments, a new approach to management is called for. IT managers are under tremendous pressure to seek new ways to manage and secure multiple IT environments in an effective manner. Automation is important because it helps reduce the operating costs, as well as the pain caused by the growing complexity of business processes and management tasks. It is simply no longer appropriate or cost-effective for these tasks to be done manually.”

Data migration was another common deployment challenge, with 44 percent of the respondents saying they found it challenging to determine which option is the best for a particular workload and to migrate workloads to new locations.

While 38 percent of enterprises surveyed claimed that they use automation to accelerate application migration, 48 percent said that migration at their company is manual and labor-intensive or that they use in-house resources. Today’s application and data migration remains complex and expensive for most organizations.

According to Kelly Morgan, Research VP, Services at 451 Research, managed services have become a key component of service delivery across a range of infrastructure and application products.

“Service providers that can offer a comprehensive portfolio of managed services across the broadest set of infrastructure options are well positioned to meet the full set of enterprise cloud requirements,” said Morgan.

Other highlights in the report include:

■ Despite concerns about security, compliance, and integration issues, organizations are embracing next-generation networking technologies such as SDN and network functions virtualization.

■ Enterprises are using innovative/emerging technologies such as containers, big data solutions and software-defined networking (SDN) in productions scenarios.

■ Enterprises are spending a significant portion of their IT budgets with third-party service providers on managed and professional services for various reasons – to lower cost, to free IT staff to focus on other projects, to improve security, and to provide specialized technical expertise. The research reveals that 41 percent of organizations work with multiple vendors and manage them themselves, and another 37 percent work with a single vendor that can offer a broad range of products and services which it builds and manages.

The research involved 1,500 IT decision makers from multiple vertical industries across the US, Europe, Asia-Pacific and South Africa.

Hot Topics

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 ...