Skip to main content

We Are in the Model T Era of Hybrid Cloud

Kash Shaikh
Virtana

The Model T automobile was introduced in 1908. Then known as horseless carriages, Henry Ford wanted it to be "affordable, simple to operate, and durable." As one of the first mass production vehicles, it made owning a car attainable for the masses. It came in a choice of one color: black. It was offered in several body styles mounted on a uniform 100-inch-wheelbase chassis: a five-seat touring car, a two-seat runabout, and a seven-seat town car.

Within a few years, competitors arrived on the scene including relic names such as Overland, Maxwell, and names that survived like Buick and Dodge.

So, what does this have to do with the hybrid cloud market? From a business perspective — a lot. This evolution of the automobile from Model T to dozens of competitors by the 50s, to hundreds of auto choices today, is the classic evolution of markets whether it be B2C or B2B.

Boxed software emerged in the 80s, it evolved to online/on demand. And, then in the past decade, tech and the world have been flooded by data. During the growth of this tsunami of data, large enterprises have kept most of their data on-premises. In fact, Gartner "predicts that by 2025, 85% of infrastructure strategies will integrate on-premises, colocation, cloud and edge delivery options, compared with 20% in 2020." Bottom line is that with just 20% of enterprise applications having been moved from on-site data centers to the public cloud — we are at the start of hybrid cloud with four major players: AWS, Azure, IBM and Google Cloud.

So, perhaps we can equate this to 1915 in the auto industry when there was the Model T and a few strong competitors. The Model T of cloud is AWS.

The public cloud is affordable for cloud-native companies that start in the cloud, but a huge risk for large enterprises. Most enterprises that started on-premises are stuck in the public cloud migration starting blocks. The issue is fear of moving critical workloads and needing to repatriate them.

Our own survey of IT decision makers revealed that most enterprises (95%) say they have moved some applications to the cloud, but not without difficulty. Seventy-two percent (72%) of the enterprises had to move one or more of their migrated applications or workloads back on-premises. Top reasons for this move back, were the following:

■ The applications should not have been moved to a public cloud in the first place (41%)

■ Technical issues associated with public cloud provisioning (36%)

■ Degradation of performance (29%)

■ Unexpected cloud costs (20%)

The critical issue for companies is needing to know projected performance before they move applications to the cloud. Large enterprises need to understand application dependencies before they migrate. This may be even more important than cost. In fact, application dependency is subsumed in the top three issues above facing large enterprises.

While enterprises have most applications "on hold" for public migration, the cloud market is about to get much more complex.

A subtle but very important component to watch is the expansion of public cloud providers into industry verticals. This battle matters because the market is huge, and it involves a different set of very large competitors from the on-premises sector.

As more mature companies move up the digital technology stack, the ground game to monitor is who is capturing loyalty from key verticals to win loyalty. The Big 4 hyper-scalers are all aggressively targeting the hybrid cloud market.

Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud CEO, recently announced that the company is selling enterprise companies on the fact that it can target individual industries better than anyone else. It is targeting retail, healthcare, financial services, media and entertainment, and manufacturing — and each has different selling points.

So, we will move quickly from the Big 4 to hundreds of providers with industry specific solutions. If we think about the tens of thousands of applications that large enterprises can consider moving off-premises to the public cloud, and marry that with not four, but hundreds of choices of cloud providers — the complexity of cloud choice will grow exponentially.

The bottom line is that the cloud wars have only begun

The bottom line is that the cloud wars have only begun. And they will be splintering into hundreds of battles by industry sector. On the cloud provider side, look for winners to emerge in media, entertainment, healthcare, and more. From the enterprise point of view, the challenges of making the wrong hybrid move will only increase.

So, what do enterprises need? Likely, a way to test drive a number of cloud providers at once so they know before they go.

Kash Shaikh is CEO and President of Virtana

Hot Topics

The Latest

Overall outage frequency and the general level of reported severity continue to decline, according to the Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute. However, cyber security incidents are on the rise and often have severe, lasting impacts ...

In March, New Relic published the State of Observability for Media and Entertainment Report to share insights, data, and analysis into the adoption and business value of observability across the media and entertainment industry. Here are six key takeaways from the report ...

Regardless of their scale, business decisions often take time, effort, and a lot of back-and-forth discussion to reach any sort of actionable conclusion ... Any means of streamlining this process and getting from complex problems to optimal solutions more efficiently and reliably is key. How can organizations optimize their decision-making to save time and reduce excess effort from those involved? ...

As enterprises accelerate their cloud adoption strategies, CIOs are routinely exceeding their cloud budgets — a concern that's about to face additional pressure from an unexpected direction: uncertainty over semiconductor tariffs. The CIO Cloud Trends Survey & Report from Azul reveals the extent continued cloud investment despite cost overruns, and how organizations are attempting to bring spending under control ...

Image
Azul

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

We Are in the Model T Era of Hybrid Cloud

Kash Shaikh
Virtana

The Model T automobile was introduced in 1908. Then known as horseless carriages, Henry Ford wanted it to be "affordable, simple to operate, and durable." As one of the first mass production vehicles, it made owning a car attainable for the masses. It came in a choice of one color: black. It was offered in several body styles mounted on a uniform 100-inch-wheelbase chassis: a five-seat touring car, a two-seat runabout, and a seven-seat town car.

Within a few years, competitors arrived on the scene including relic names such as Overland, Maxwell, and names that survived like Buick and Dodge.

So, what does this have to do with the hybrid cloud market? From a business perspective — a lot. This evolution of the automobile from Model T to dozens of competitors by the 50s, to hundreds of auto choices today, is the classic evolution of markets whether it be B2C or B2B.

Boxed software emerged in the 80s, it evolved to online/on demand. And, then in the past decade, tech and the world have been flooded by data. During the growth of this tsunami of data, large enterprises have kept most of their data on-premises. In fact, Gartner "predicts that by 2025, 85% of infrastructure strategies will integrate on-premises, colocation, cloud and edge delivery options, compared with 20% in 2020." Bottom line is that with just 20% of enterprise applications having been moved from on-site data centers to the public cloud — we are at the start of hybrid cloud with four major players: AWS, Azure, IBM and Google Cloud.

So, perhaps we can equate this to 1915 in the auto industry when there was the Model T and a few strong competitors. The Model T of cloud is AWS.

The public cloud is affordable for cloud-native companies that start in the cloud, but a huge risk for large enterprises. Most enterprises that started on-premises are stuck in the public cloud migration starting blocks. The issue is fear of moving critical workloads and needing to repatriate them.

Our own survey of IT decision makers revealed that most enterprises (95%) say they have moved some applications to the cloud, but not without difficulty. Seventy-two percent (72%) of the enterprises had to move one or more of their migrated applications or workloads back on-premises. Top reasons for this move back, were the following:

■ The applications should not have been moved to a public cloud in the first place (41%)

■ Technical issues associated with public cloud provisioning (36%)

■ Degradation of performance (29%)

■ Unexpected cloud costs (20%)

The critical issue for companies is needing to know projected performance before they move applications to the cloud. Large enterprises need to understand application dependencies before they migrate. This may be even more important than cost. In fact, application dependency is subsumed in the top three issues above facing large enterprises.

While enterprises have most applications "on hold" for public migration, the cloud market is about to get much more complex.

A subtle but very important component to watch is the expansion of public cloud providers into industry verticals. This battle matters because the market is huge, and it involves a different set of very large competitors from the on-premises sector.

As more mature companies move up the digital technology stack, the ground game to monitor is who is capturing loyalty from key verticals to win loyalty. The Big 4 hyper-scalers are all aggressively targeting the hybrid cloud market.

Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud CEO, recently announced that the company is selling enterprise companies on the fact that it can target individual industries better than anyone else. It is targeting retail, healthcare, financial services, media and entertainment, and manufacturing — and each has different selling points.

So, we will move quickly from the Big 4 to hundreds of providers with industry specific solutions. If we think about the tens of thousands of applications that large enterprises can consider moving off-premises to the public cloud, and marry that with not four, but hundreds of choices of cloud providers — the complexity of cloud choice will grow exponentially.

The bottom line is that the cloud wars have only begun

The bottom line is that the cloud wars have only begun. And they will be splintering into hundreds of battles by industry sector. On the cloud provider side, look for winners to emerge in media, entertainment, healthcare, and more. From the enterprise point of view, the challenges of making the wrong hybrid move will only increase.

So, what do enterprises need? Likely, a way to test drive a number of cloud providers at once so they know before they go.

Kash Shaikh is CEO and President of Virtana

Hot Topics

The Latest

Overall outage frequency and the general level of reported severity continue to decline, according to the Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute. However, cyber security incidents are on the rise and often have severe, lasting impacts ...

In March, New Relic published the State of Observability for Media and Entertainment Report to share insights, data, and analysis into the adoption and business value of observability across the media and entertainment industry. Here are six key takeaways from the report ...

Regardless of their scale, business decisions often take time, effort, and a lot of back-and-forth discussion to reach any sort of actionable conclusion ... Any means of streamlining this process and getting from complex problems to optimal solutions more efficiently and reliably is key. How can organizations optimize their decision-making to save time and reduce excess effort from those involved? ...

As enterprises accelerate their cloud adoption strategies, CIOs are routinely exceeding their cloud budgets — a concern that's about to face additional pressure from an unexpected direction: uncertainty over semiconductor tariffs. The CIO Cloud Trends Survey & Report from Azul reveals the extent continued cloud investment despite cost overruns, and how organizations are attempting to bring spending under control ...

Image
Azul

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...