Level 3 is finding as it talks to its business customers about their cloud service transitions that more of them are at some stage of adopting hybrid IT.
While still an emerging concept, hybrid IT is an approach to computing in which an organization provides and manages some IT resources in-house but uses cloud-based services for others.
Enterprises have not yet dramatically transformed their network connectivity for cloud and hybrid IT, but they do expect to make major improvements to their network connectivity over the coming 12 months. According to a joint study conducted by Level 3 with Tech Target, businesses are either very or somewhat familiar with Hybrid IT.
Some of the main benefits respondents said were important about Hybrid IT included agility (59%), alignment between IT and business goals (53%), application availability/performance (42%) and security (37%).
Level 3 noted that enterprises have not yet dramatically transformed their network connectivity for cloud and hybrid IT, but they do expect to make major improvements to their network connectivity over the coming 12 months.
"Hybrid IT is foundational to a successful digital transformation,” said Paul Savill, SVP, global core product management for Level 3, in a release. “To bolster their hybrid IT programs, enterprises need to leverage the new technologies available to upgrade their network infrastructure for greater security, flexibility and automation."
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Cloud service adoption among businesses continues to also rise.
Close to half of the survey respondents are using cloud services for tier one workloads, illustrating that there’s a strong indication that cloud computing is at the core of many business' digital transformation efforts.
As enterprises evaluate cloud platforms, security, reliable up time, bandwidth capabilities and low latency are the top features.
Enterprises said they are “reasonably satisfied” with how their networks deliver on their most-cited network requirements, but only a small number of them said they were highly satisfied.
Level 3 asked respondents to rate the importance of a variety of features as well as their satisfaction with service provider performance of those features, and found on average an 11% lower satisfaction rating than importance rating.