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• Each year, independent research firms are commissioned to survey IT leaders and implementers responsible for their organizations' data protection strategies.
• One of the most important aspects of this annual research is to understand organizations’ strategies towards hybrid- and multi-cloud architectures as their IT teams endeavor to facilitate their business processes.
• While the first several months after COVID caused a significant acceleration of cloud adoption, the succeeding four years have shown a relatively consistent distribution of workloads across data centers, private clouds, and multiple public clouds.
• For 2024, organizations stated that nearly half of their production workloads run within a public cloud with the rest remaining equally divided between physical servers and virtual machines within their data centers.
• What has not been seen in past decades’ IT landscapes is the diversity of “gold standard” production platforms of choice. In times past, a best of breed data center might rely almost solely on Novell NetWare or Windows Server infrastructure — which was later surpassed by virtualized infrastructure from VMware, Hyper-V, and other hypervisors.
• In those past generations, it was not uncommon to see a true migration from yesteryears’ platform of choice to the new platform with a single best of breed data protection solution being chosen that matches the new platform (e.g., Veeam for VMware) with the myriad clouds.
• With such excitement around cloud services, it would be easy but incorrect to assume that the importance of the modern data center is diminishing.
• Instead, data suggests that most organizations have a “cloud smart” strategy of considering cloud hosted workloads by default for new workloads by default which in turn dilutes the percentage of IT services still provided by the data center without those workloads actually being migrated from those physical facilities.
• Moreover, it is becoming increasingly common for business processes and economic considerations to affect which workloads will be hosted on- or off-premises.
• In fact, even within each cloud, one cannot assume that the “journey to the cloud” is a one-way journey nor to one service provider. Instead, there is both opportunity and challenge created by the business requirement of being able to fluidly move workloads between data centers and clouds, between clouds, and back again.

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