By Mike Fuhrman, Chief Operating Officer of Cloud and Managed Services, Flexential

Data Migration - to the Cloud and Back

Today's IT leaders are continuously challenged to simplify enterprise workloads and deliver strong performance. This year, getting workload management under control will be a top priority in order to achieve these objectives. While some businesses may have implemented public cloud strategies this year in an attempt to eliminate complexities, in 2020 we will see many businesses boomerang from all-in cloud strategies to hybrid IT models as they learn that a fully public cloud model may not actually be best suited for their entire organizational needs.

Individualized Plans for Individualized Workloads

No IT infrastructure is the same, and workload solutions need to be just as unique as the infrastructures they support. Between 2017 and 2023, the global hybrid cloud market is expected to increase by $90 billion - this indicates that businesses are starting to better understand the need for tailored solutions for their IT workloads.

This year, we can expect to see enterprises increasingly de-centralize their workloads to keep up with network needs and expectations. As the hype of the all-in public cloud dies down, Hybrid IT will become more popular than ever as corporations work to determine the just-right IT infrastructure environment for their business. The bottom line is that Hybrid IT offers the flexibility that businesses need to manage their workloads, and the value of that flexibility cannot be underestimated.

Many organizations that began migration to the public cloud in 2019 found that this one-size-fits-all approach wasn't working for their organization. 2020 will bring formal IT assessments for many organizations who started going all-in on public cloud, to determine which type of environment is really best suited for their data - whether that be a public, private, hybrid or multi-cloud environment. The main determining factors will be the level of control desired to troubleshoot and monitor workloads, how close to the edge the business would like to bring their data, cost, privacy and compliance.

If 2019 was the year of public cloud hype, 2020 will be a year of reckoning as more and more businesses realize that solving their biggest IT challenges unfortunately is not as simple as porting to a fully public cloud model. By the end of 2020, Hybrid IT will have taken over as the most popular option for addressing these challenges.

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About the Author

Mike Fuhrman leads Flexential's product and service strategy, research and development, and internal IT initiatives specifically focused on the cloud and managed services business. Joining Flexential in 2015, Mike is responsible for positioning Flexential to continue its growth trajectory and delivery of innovative solutions to customers and a highly scalable back office. Mike has over two decades of technical leadership experience. He spent much of his career at Cisco, where he was last responsible for the delivery and scaling of all cloud-based services for the suite of Cisco security platforms. Mike graduated from the Citadel with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and holds a M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at San Antonio.