Enterprises are increasingly turning to hybrid cloud environments as offering the best of two worlds – joining the public cloud advantages of scalable, pay-as-you-go infrastructure with private cloud’s control and predictability. This approach requires placing workloads where they’ll yield the greatest benefit for the business, whether that means modernizing software to enhance the customer experience or securing access to mission-critical applications and data.

To remain competitive, organizations are undergoing a transformation – of their IT environments, their procurement routines, their development and operations practices, and, ultimately, their business processes and culture. The changes required are unique to each enterprise, but the gains to be made are too compelling to ignore: greater IT cost efficiency, business agility and resilience.

The transition is not without challenges, however, and the consequences of missteps can be considerable: wasted spending, technical debt and, in some cases, reverse migration of applications and data, not to mention disgruntled IT staff. With a wider variety of environments to handle, IT departments need to keep multiple applications in tune across public and private clouds. Recent 451 Research data shows that 65% of enterprises with hybrid cloud deployments are contracting out some workloads, and IT systems monitoring and management is the top target for managed services, sought by over half of survey respondents.