The International Data Corporation (IDC) end-user study, CloudView 2016, has found that 67% of all Australian organisations surveyed are embracing cloud, using public or private cloud for more than one or two small applications or workloads yet only 13% of the respondents believed that they have an "optimised" cloud strategy.

Results from the survey clearly indicate that Australian organisations continue to adopt cloud solutions with no bias towards either public or private cloud, indicating that the organisations are moving in the direction of a hybrid cloud future.

When asked about hybrid cloud adoption characteristics, there was no consensus around the definition of a hybrid cloud environment - and therefore what is needed to be managed. Depending on their own definition of a hybrid cloud, over 50% of respondents have already adopted what they consider to be a hybrid cloud strategy, while close to 80% of all respondents have some aspirations for a hybrid cloud environment.

What is clear from these results is that while some Australian organisations understand that hybrid clouds are a service delivery architecture, the rest still consider them to be product-focused infrastructure implementations.

“The range of solutions and services available that interconnect private and public clouds as well as bridging between multiple public clouds has enabled enterprises to adopt solutions based on hybrid cloud architectures. The increased adoption of Hybrid cloud to facilitate enterprises' digital transformation agenda will further positively impact the growth of cloud services in Australia” says Prabhitha Dcruz, Senior Market Analyst with IDC Australia.

For many respondents, cloud is still viewed as a means to reduce IT budgets and remains in the top 3 drivers for cloud adoption irrespective of the cloud delivery model. This reflects the lower maturity levels of many organizations.

Further, the survey results indicate that public cloud spending is expected to be essentially flat during the next two years as Australian organisations begin to transition their more complex and critical workloads to off-premises clouds.

Most of the growth is thus expected to be from hosted private cloud adoption –both on demand and dedicated hosted private cloud, driven by the accelerating rate of substitution of traditional outsourcing for cloud based services. As such, traditional outsourcing providers that do not have a strategy to offer cloud based services are under constant pressure and will need to evolve their business models to include cloud delivery to sustain in a competitive market.

Chris Morris, IDC's VP for Cloud Services research added that "The challenge for many CIOs as they begin hybrid cloud implementations is experience and skills. Hybrid clouds require expertise that is low in availability and the smart CIO decides on an experienced implementation partner at the beginning of their project. Working with a partner at early stages of a project to plan the implementation can minimise risks of project budget and timelines overruns."