IDC: Workload & TCO Considerations when Choosing Between Public, Private & Hybrid Cloud

In today’s rapidly evolving business environment, organizations aren’t just using one type of cloud infrastructure to run their business. They are often investing in several different types, from private cloud (on-premises or hosted) to public cloud, to hybrid cloud as they consider options to enhance or replace traditional data centers.

IT teams around the world are transforming datacenter operations (including people, processes, and organizational roles) and shifting infrastructure investments toward highly automated solutions to better focus on application-centric (rather than infrastructure-centric) decisions. For most of these organizations, this means increased adoption of cloud technologies and cloud-centric operating models. This transformation also requires support for a hybrid cloud, and possibly even multi-cloud, environment that allows IT operations teams to decide the type and location of the infrastructure required (e.g., off-premises public cloud, on-premises private cloud, a truly hybrid cloud, or traditional/legacy infrastructure) based on the need of the workloads rather than the infrastructure deployed or the team's skill set.

In this white paper, IDC provides considerations and a framework for making workload-based decisions about which cloud infrastructure approach to use to drive the greatest business value. In addition to qualitative factors, it also compares the five-year total cost of ownership related to the type and location of the infrastructure required to run a predetermined, representative set of enterprise workloads.