Hybrid cloud still an unfulfilled goal for most

Storage vendors often talk about this being a transformation period in storage. EMC, whose executives use that term as much as anybody, conducted an analysis of its customers to see just where they stand in the transformation.

EMC and its VMware subsidiary conducted IT transformation workshops across 18 industries to gauge their customers’ progress. The workshop focused on helping organizations identify gaps in their IT transformation, determine goals and prioritize their next steps.

While organizations generally were far along in virtualization, they have a long way to go in streamlining infrastructure and moving to hybrid cloud architectures:

• More than 90% are in the evaluation or proof of concept stage for hybrid clouds, and 91% have no organized, consistent way of evaluating workloads for the hybrid cloud.
• 95% say it is critical to have a services-oriented IT organization without silos but less than four percent operate that way.
• 76% of organizations have no developed self-service portals or service catalog – crucial pieces to building a private cloud.
• 77% want to provision infrastructure resources in less than a day, but most say it takes between a week and a month to do so.
• Only the top 20^th percentile can do showback and chargeback to bill the business for services consumed, and 70% say they don’t know what resources each business unit is consuming.

So if so many organizations want to streamline their IT and build hybrid clouds, why have so few done so? If you guessed cost, you’re probably on the right track.

“There are usually two limiting factors,” said Barbara Robidoux, VP of marketing for EMC global services. “They’re all being told they have to hold costs down, especially on the legacy side. If they’re going to go forward and modernize any aspect, that costs money, yet they’re being told to hold costs down. So to some degree, you’re stuck. We’re hearing ‘We need help with ROI analysis to see how we can save money on infrastructure.’ The other thing is a lack of skills and know-how. That’s pretty disruptive.”