THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS: USING A HYBRID

APPROACH TO BOOST IT AGILITY

August 2016

Jim Rapoza, Senior Research Analyst & Editorial Director,

Information Technology

Report Highlights

p3 p4 p6 p7

59% of small and
midsized businesses
are concerned about
security, privacy,
and compliance
issues for their IT
infrastructure.
42% of small and
midsized businesses
list ongoing cost as a
key criteria when
evaluating cloud-
based systems.
Small and midsized Small and midsized
businesses with a businesses with a
hybrid IT approach hybrid IT approach
are 6.3x more likely are twice as likely to
to see improved have an improved
application ability to increase
performance. capacity.

With a hybrid IT approach, small and midsized businesses can

leverage the greater control, faster access, and increased
security that comes with on-premise, while taking advantage of
the increased agility, reduced costs, and better flexibility that the
cloud offers.

2
Small and midsized
businesses can meet
all of their IT
infrastructure needs
by taking a hybrid IT
approach that gives
them the
performance of on-
premise with the
flexibility of the
cloud.
Hybrid IT refers to an IT
infrastructure that includes
multiple scenarios i.e.,
virtualized servers, non-virtualized
hardware; public cloud, private
cloud, hosted services from
multiple vendors all to support
an organizations workload and
portfolio of applications.
The Best of Both Worlds: Using a Hybrid Approach to Boost IT Agility
Every day people are faced with major life-altering choices. Buy
or rent? Start your own business or work for someone else? Do I
want fries with that? OK, maybe that last one isnt really life-
altering.
The key takeaway is that people often feel that nearly every
choice boils down to an either/or proposition. And it isnt just
people businesses and their IT departments often build their
IT infrastructure from an either/or point of view.
This is especially true when a small to midsized business is
looking to build or upgrade their IT infrastructure. And often, the
biggest choice that these organizations face is whether to build
their infrastructure on-premise or to go with the public cloud.
But Aberdeen Group research shows that the best choice is to do
both.
With a hybrid IT approach, small and midsized businesses can
leverage the greater control, faster access, and increased
security that comes with on-premise, while taking advantage of
the increased agility, reduced costs, and better flexibility that the
cloud offers. And best of all, a hybrid IT approach can be
implemented quickly and easily, making it a perfect fit for small
and midsized businesses that can do without the high costs and
complexity that traditional approaches to IT can often bring.
In this report, well look at some of the challenges that smaller
organizations face in building and managing IT, along with how
some businesses are leveraging a hybrid cloud and on-premise
approach, gaining some significant benefits through this
approach.
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 The Best of Both Worlds: Using a Hybrid Approach to Boost IT Agility

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Need to Choose Between Cloud and On-Premise? Choose Both
The best way to
For many small and midsized businesses, the choice between
choose between on-
cloud and on-premise is often based on where the company
itself is in its maturity cycle. Startups and other new businesses
premise and cloud
may decide to go 100% cloud, as they have no legacy systems or infrastructures is to
issues to worry about. And established businesses, already choose both, with a
invested in on-premise systems, will often choose to stick with hybrid approach.
these investments.

However, these choices may not be the best way to address the
many complex IT challenges that small and midsized businesses
face today. And many of these organizations find that an
either/or approach could be making it harder for them to
address these challenges.

Figure 1: Top IT Infrastructure Challenges for SMBs

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 The Best of Both Worlds: Using a Hybrid Approach to Boost IT Agility

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For the purposes of this report, we surveyed small and midsized
organizations about the challenges they face in building IT
infrastructures and utilizing cloud-based technologies. Not
surprisingly, the number one challenge is around security, data
privacy, and regulatory compliance.

However, we find that the number two challenge centers on the

issues of getting all aspects of their IT infrastructure to work
together, which would not be such a major challenge if
businesses were sticking to just on-premise or cloud. These
organizations are looking to get the most out of their existing IT
infrastructure while adding on public cloud capabilities.

Underlining the importance of getting on-premise and cloud to

work together, we find that it is not only a hurdle, but also the
key criteria that small and midsized businesses use when
selecting cloud-based systems. In Figure 2 below, we asked
small and midsized businesses what the criteria were when
choosing cloud-based systems.

Figure 2: Top SMB Criteria for Cloud Technologies

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 The Best of Both Worlds: Using a Hybrid Approach to Boost IT Agility

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Given the cost sensitivities of many small and midsized
businesses, its no surprise that ongoing cost comes in at the
number two criteria. But the top ranking of working with existing
infrastructure shows the high importance that businesses put on
having strong on-premise and cloud-based platforms that not
only operate well on their own, but can work together to make
each other better.

Also bucking typical impressions of small and midsized

businesses is the importance that scalability has in the selection
of cloud platforms. Just as much as large enterprises, these
organizations look for solutions that will allow them to grow and
scale their IT infrastructure to meet any demand or emerging
need. And they are looking to ensure that they are running the
right workloads on the right platforms, for example, some
workloads require the speed and control of on-premise while
some need the flexibility of the cloud.

With the previous data on challenges and selection criteria in

mind, it becomes increasingly clear why a hybrid approach is
vital. With hybrid IT, businesses have the increased security and
performance that comes with their on-premise systems, while
leveraging the clouds ability to deploy applications quickly,
keep infrastructure costs down, and scale capacity as needed.

Looking at Figure 3 below, we see some of the key ways that

small and midsized businesses taking a hybrid IT approach are
excelling over their peers who have yet to embrace hybrid.

When it comes to improved performance and scalability, these

organizations with a hybrid approach are over six times more
likely to have improved performance and twice as likely to be

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 The Best of Both Worlds: Using a Hybrid Approach to Boost IT Agility

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able to grow capacity. And these small and midsized businesses
with hybrid IT are also much more likely to reduce downtime for
their IT infrastructure.

Figure 3: Hybrid Approach Gives SMBs IT Agility

Looking at this data, we clearly see how a hybrid approach

increases agility and scalability and boosts the bottom line.
These small and midsized businesses see better performance
and scalability and reduced downtime and costs.

Getting the Most from On-Premise and the Cloud

In this report, weve made the argument that the best way to
choose between on-premise and cloud infrastructures is to
choose both a hybrid approach.

But does a hybrid approach mean that an organization must

compromise? Does it mean that, instead of getting one
infrastructure at its best, a business is getting two systems that
are less than they could be?

Aberdeen research shows that the exact opposite is true. Small

and midsized businesses taking a hybrid IT approach gain many

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 The Best of Both Worlds: Using a Hybrid Approach to Boost IT Agility

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benefits that allow them to have a high-performing IT
infrastructure.

To analyze these benefits, we researched small and midsized

businesses that took a hybrid IT approach, and use on-premise
servers and systems designed to work well with cloud-based
technologies.

As the data in Figure 4 below shows, these hybrid IT

organizations gain many advantages over their small and
midsized peers that have yet to embrace hybrid approaches.

Figure 4: SMBs Win with a Hybrid Cloud/On-premise

Approach

Small and midsized businesses with hybrid IT are more than

twice as likely to report having improved IT flexibility. Clearly,

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 The Best of Both Worlds: Using a Hybrid Approach to Boost IT Agility

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being able to leverage on-premise or cloud at the times and
for the services that they make the most sense gives them this
vital flexibility.

Probably most importantly for many smaller organizations, a

hybrid approach pays off by making it much more likely that
these businesses will see a reduction in their overall IT
expenditure costs.

Along with the increased flexibility and scalability, a big source

of these cost reductions is probably due to how hybrid
businesses see less downtime and excel at reducing IT risks.

Key Takeaways

Small and midsized businesses leveraging a hybrid IT approach

that combines cloud-based systems with an on-premise
infrastructure gain a number of key benefits. But to get to this
hybrid IT reality, they need to follow a few best practices.

As weve said, the right choice between on-premise and cloud is

to choose both. But to get the most out of this hybrid IT
approach, small and midsized businesses need to enable well-
designed systems with high performance, reliability, and the
ability to scale.

To get to an effective hybrid IT infrastructure, small and

midsized businesses should:

Understand your cloud infrastructure requirements.

Some organizations think that implementing public cloud
is as simple as choosing a cloud provider. But leaders in
IT infrastructure know that it requires more upfront work
in understanding what needs to be in the cloud and what
should run on-premise. By working to understand what

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 The Best of Both Worlds: Using a Hybrid Approach to Boost IT Agility

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services and applications should run on the public cloud,
small and midsized businesses will have a much more
effective hybrid IT infrastructure.

Know your current technology requirements. You cant

grow and improve a system that you dont fully
understand. For small and midsized businesses to get the
most out of a move to hybrid IT, they need to have full
visibility into all of their servers, processes, and
applications, both on physical devices and in the cloud.

Get your in-house systems ready for a hybrid world.

While weve shown the benefits of a hybrid IT approach,
getting to these benefits will be impossible if an
organizations on-premise systems are out-of-date,
overwhelmed, and poorly managed. Small and midsized
businesses that succeed with hybrid IT ensure that their
on-premise base is up-to-date, high performing, and
ready to meet the challenges of modern IT.

Make cloud and on-premise work together. Ability to

use cloud and on-premise systems together is both a top
challenge and a top selection criteria for the IT staff at
small and midsized businesses. By utilizing both cloud
and on-premise, these organizations will be able to get
the most out of both platforms and increase the ability of
their technology initiatives.

Create an infrastructure designed for today, and

tomorrow. As emerging technologies continue to come
onto the scene, bringing both new opportunities and
increased IT complexities, small and midsized businesses

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need to be ready. With an agile and flexible hybrid
infrastructure, these organizations can reduce the
complexity of these technologies and increase their
ability to utilize them to gain competitive advantages.

When someone gets everything they need without having to

make a choice, its like having your cake and eating it, too. Small
and midsized businesses can meet all of their IT infrastructure
needs by taking a hybrid IT approach that gives them all of the
performance and direct control capabilities of on-premise,
integrated with the scalability and flexibility of the cloud.

And when we look at the reduced costs, improved agility, and

greater reliability that a hybrid approach brings to small and
midsized businesses, we clearly see what the right choice is.

Choose both on-premise and cloud. Choose a hybrid approach.

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 The Best of Both Worlds: Using a Hybrid Approach to Boost IT Agility

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For more information on this or other research topics, please visit www.aberdeen.com.

Related Research
Get The Enterprise Applications You Need With The Have it Your Way Approach to Private Cloud;
Private Cloud; July 2016 February 2016
Getting the Most Mileage Out of Hybrid Cloud; April Get a New Look for Your SMB Server Infrastructure;
2016 January 2016

Author: Jim Rapoza, Senior Research Analyst & Editorial Director, Information Technology
(jim.rapoza@aberdeen.com)

About Aberdeen Group

Since 1988, Aberdeen Group has published research that helps businesses worldwide improve their performance.
Our analysts derive fact-based, vendor-agnostic insights from a proprietary analytical framework, which identifies
Best-in-Class organizations from primary research conducted with industry practitioners. The resulting research
content is used by hundreds of thousands of business professionals to drive smarter decision-making and improve
business strategy. Aberdeen Group is headquartered in Waltham, MA.

This document is the result of primary research performed by Aberdeen Group and represents the best analysis
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