Guest Author: Brad Casemore
IDC Research Director, Datacenter Networks

Whether resident in traditional datacenters or -increasingly -in the cloud, applications remain the means by which digital transformation is brought to fruition and business value is realized. Accordingly, management and orchestration of applications -and not just management of infrastructure resources -are critical to successful digital transformation initiatives.

IDC research finds that enterprises will continue to run applications in a variety of environments, including traditional datacenters, private clouds, and public clouds. That said, cloud adoption is an expanding element of enterprise IT strategies.

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In 2016, enterprise adoption of cloud moved into the mainstream, with about 68% of respondents to IDC's annualCloudViewsurvey indicating they were currently using public or private cloud for more than one or two small applications, a 61% increase over the prior year's survey.

Within this context, enterprises want cloud-management solutions that allow them to get full value from their existing IT capabilities as well as from their ongoing and planned cloud initiatives. At the same time, enterprises don't want to be locked in to a particular platform or cloud. They want the freedom to deploy and manage applications in both their datacenter and in cloud environments, and they want to be able to do so efficiently, securely, and with full control. Ideally, they want the application environment to be dictated exclusively by business requirements and technical applicability rather than by external constraints. This is why enterprises are increasingly wary of tools optimized for a single application environment, and why they are equally skeptical of automation that is hardwired to a specific cloud.

To be sure, the greatest benefit of having an optimized cloud-application management system is strategic flexibility. In implementing a hybrid IT strategy with consistent multi-cloud application management, enterprise IT can deliver on the full promise of cloud while reducing the complexity, cost, security, governance, and lock-in risks associated with delivering services across mixed environments. As such, there's no need to worry about cloud-specific APIs or about the threat of cloud lock-in. Instead, enterprises can focus on a service delivery strategy tailored to the needs of the organization, allowing applications to be deployed in the best possible environments.

An additional benefit is represented by speed and agility. In this respect, enterprises can align operations with agile development, helping accelerate the application development lifecycle. For example, enterprises can boost productivity and decrease time to market by providing developers with self-service portals to provision fully configured application stacks in any environment. Developers can remain focused on customer needs, and not on infrastructure or downstream deployment services.

To learn more about the challenges and benefits of managing applications across hybrid clouds, and to read about how Cisco CloudCenter responds to those challenges, I invite you to listen read an IDC Technology Spotlight titled, "Avoiding Cloud Lock-In: Managing Applications Across Hybrid Clouds."

Watch Video and Read IDC Paper