Hybrid trumps private and public cloud - Oracle

Database giant says tide turning in favour of hybrid version of the fluffy form of IT

Hybrid cloud is pulling ahead of its private and public counterparts in terms of its popularity among end users, research commissioned by Oracle claims.

According to the database giant – which claimed last year that it had grown to become the world’s second-largest SaaS player – organisations are most likely to plump for the hybrid option when weighing up their next steps in cloud computing.

Deploying more hybrid cloud services was selected by 36 per cent of the C-level executives and IT decision makers polled, ahead of private (32 per cent) and public (17 per cent) cloud services.

“The recent acceleration in cloud adoption has been focused on enterprise applications and addressing the related integration, scalability and security challenges,” said John Abel, EMEA senior director at Oracle.

“Our survey shows, however, that as the hybrid cloud evolves into the core approach for businesses, the platform grows in importance, providing as it must the ability for businesses to move from private to public cloud and back seamlessly and securely.”

The research backs up musings from IDC, which said recently that it expects 65 per cent of enterprise IT organisations to commit to cloud before the year is out.

The Oracle-backed study of 300 respondents in EMEA, conducted by IDG Connect, also found that private cloud adoption is rapidly reaching maturity. Some 60 per cent of enterprises have reached "intermediate" or "mature" levels of adoption, the survey found, a figure Oracle said is set to rise to 83 per cent by 2017.

However, significant concerns continue to surround private cloud adoption, Oracle added, with data security a worry for 55 per cent of respondents, integration with existing applications vexing 47 per cent, available skills 45 per cent and hardware costs 44 per cent.

Within private cloud, SaaS is viewed as the most important form (68 per cent), ahead of database-as-a-service (DaaS) on 61 per cent and PaaS on 57 per cent. But the survey found that DaaS will become the most important form of private cloud over the next two years (29 per cent) ahead of PaaS (26 per cent) and SaaS (23 per cent).

Bob Johnson, principal analyst at IDG Connect, said: “While SaaS has traditionally led enterprise migration to the cloud, other services such as DaaS and PaaS are set to become more important over the next two years.

“This trend reflects how quickly the cloud is growing in maturity and sophistication. Given this rapid development in cloud capability, it’s likely that 2017 will see widespread use of cloud-based platforms and tools – increasingly delivered over hybrid architectures – to develop and test transformational business applications.”