Frost and Sullivan in Partnership With VMware Unveils the Hybrid Cloud Maturity Index (HCMI) Assessment for Enterprises

Business Wire IndiaVMware, Inc. (VMW), a leading innovator in enterprise software, along with Frost & Sullivan, leading global research and consulting firm, released the Hybrid Cloud Maturity Index (HCMI) 2019 assessment of enterprises. In 2019, 300 enterprises were surveyed on their competence and capability in Hybrid Cloud adoption against a set of technology and strategic excellence criteria.

Frost & Sullivan’s HCMI model creates a path for enterprises to evaluate their Cloud journey based on the benchmarking exercise against two aspects – Strategic Excellence and Technology Excellence. This platform aims to help understand the maturity of hybrid cloud adoption in India.

According to the assessment, Enterprises realize that cloud is a critical foundation for digital transformation, therefore, more than 70% of enterprises surveyed have already started to use cloud services^[1]. However, only 24% of these enterprises in India currently have well-defined strategic objectives aligned to migrating applications to the cloud (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS). ^[2]

Apalak Ghosh, Program Manager and Head of Cloud Computing, Frost & Sullivan, “From the enterprises that we assessed, we saw that although Public Cloud is the most used model, Hybrid Cloud is expected to be an industry standard within the coming years and is expected to nearly double in next 2-3 years.”

Pradeep Nair, VP, and MD, VMware India, “Indian organizations are at an interesting juncture where they are determined to leverage technology for development and growth. VMware is positioned better than ever to help Indian organizations get the best out of their technology investments. Adoption of cloud native technologies can give Indian companies an advantage in today's dynamic business environment, helping to promote the Industry 4.0 in the country.”

BS Nagarajan, senior director and chief technologies, VMware India, “Hybrid cloud are unlocking unprecedented opportunities for businesses to leverage nearly infinite resources across the data center, cloud and edge. IT organizations are increasingly turning to Hybrid Cloud to empower their businesses to deliver the optimal environment for all their applications. The Hybrid Cloud Maturity Index (HCMI) assessment underlines the eagerness of Indian enterprises looking to embrace Hybrid Cloud with adoption likely to double in the next 2-3 years. ^[3]This is because Hybrid Cloud provides a high level of security, control, and performance while maintaining flexibility, scalability, and economies of scale.”^[4]

Key highlights from the HCMI assessment^[5] –

• Need for robust Cloud Migration strategy

• More than 60 percent of enterprises surveyed have said that they are using cloud services but do not have strategic objectives aligned with cloud migration.
• IT leaders need to consider cloud as a strategic business enabler, rather than solely to solve tactical problems. Therefore, robust cloud migration strategies with mapped to objectives such as ROI, TCO, etc. becomes vital.

• Hybrid Cloud gaining traction

• Hybrid and multi-cloud environments are gaining in-roads as businesses seek flexible IT environments, and vendors introduce new management platforms that support a variety of services and protocols.
• Hybrid cloud adoption is expected to double in the next two years. Enterprises with effective Hybrid Cloud architecture are expected to better cope with the evolving business requirement in this digital era.

• Need to upskill the IT workforce

• More than 65 percent of organizations have said that a lack of highly trained experts is a challenge for managing Hybrid Cloud environments
• Enterprises need to up-skill and train the IT/Technology team to enable effective management and enablement of Hybrid IT environments

• Need for Proper Workload Assessment
• Some businesses start migrating their workloads to the cloud without proper due diligence of their applications and workloads, which leads to multiple challenges such as less optimized workloads, security issues, etc.
• Enterprises need to have a standard process for their workload assessment before migrating any application to a suitable cloud environment.