Despite 75% of IT decision makers wanting to procure all cloud services from a single provider, the majority have purchased offerings from three vendors, resulting in a complex cloud environment that may be hindering their agility and speed to market.
So finds a new report from Telstra, and according to Martin Bishop, Head of Network, Applications & Services, with consumers more in control of their purchasing power than ever before, a flexible and scalable cloud infrastructure has become increasingly critical to an organisations' success or failure.
"We are living in a buyers' market and our research suggests that in an effort to satisfy diverse customer expectations, many businesses initially turn to multiple cloud vendors to meet their various infrastructure needs. The result can be a complex cloud environment that is hard for the business to manage, integrate and control.
"Despite this, our research also reveals that pooling resources into a single private cloud isn't the ideal end-state either, with the majority of IT decision makers arguing this model fails to deliver the flexibility required for the varying types of processes, services and workloads that global companies must support.
"In a move away from the private clouds of yesterday, the trend in 2015 appears to be towards a hybrid approach, delivered by a single partner, fully accountable for an organisations cloud services end-to-end.
"In fact, our research shows that 72 per cent of IT decision makers would prefer a single provider or broker for all cloud services, then go through the challenge of managing multiple vendors."
According to Telstra's research, the flexibility and scalability associated with a hybrid cloud are what local IT leaders consider the most appealing benefits of this model.
Bishop added: "The market has shifted and customers now have the power to do what they want, when they want and how they want. Technology is clearly at the centre of this enablement and organisations that can align the power of hybrid cloud with customer demands are well placed to create what we're terming the Customer Centric Cloud - enabling more agile development and testing of applications, faster decision making and overall, an enhanced customer experience."