I believe that the evolution to hybrid cloud is inevitable. Not because it’s grabbing headlines, but because it mirrors the industry’s history of new technology adoption. Take the evolution of virtualization, for example. Going back 20 years give or take, virtual machines popularized by VMware, KVM, and Hyper-V started to gain traction.

Worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 18.4% in 2021, with the cloud projected to make up 14.2% of the total global enterprise IT spending market in 2024, up from 9.1% in 2020, according to Gartner. Enterprises are, therefore, rightly concerned about controlling their public cloud costs—to ensure they’re getting all the value they’re paying for.

Cloud migration is, more often than not, treated as a one-way street where organizations migrate applications and workloads from on-premises to a public cloud, or less often, from one public cloud to another. But a key finding in our recent State of Hybrid Cloud survey of 350 IT professionals with cloud decision influence/authority is that a whopping 72% of participating organizations stated that they’ve had to move applications back on-premises after migrating them to the public cloud.

Last week my colleague, Clay Ryder, and I presented a webinar, titled No! The cloud is not someone else’s data center, in which we examined how companies can reduce the complexity of a cloud migration and accelerate the benefits of digital transformation. It’s an important topic, so as a follow-up to the session, I’ve summarized five key things you need to understand to be successful in the cloud. If you missed the session, you can listen to the full discussion at the link above.