April TechPulse Confirms Dominance of Hybrid Cloud for Scaling
In the April TechPulse survey, scaling via hybrid cloud was twice as popular as scaling in place, while a vanishingly small minority were replatforming in the cloud exclusively
Hybrid cloud was the dominant mode of scaling for IBM Power shops in April’s TechPulse survey, while a vanishingly small minority said they were replatforming in the cloud exclusively.
In other results in the survey of 44 technologists, data warehousing and analytics led the pack as the fastest-growing workload in IBM Power environments. Additionally, as shops’ most commonly cited challenge in application growth was frequently exhausted storage capacity.
Hybrid cloud dominates.
Sixty-three percent of respondents said their organization’s primary path for scaling core applications is hybrid cloud—keeping core applications on-premises while extending and integrating with cloud services. Scaling in place (increasing MIPS/MSUs on-premises) was the second most common approach, chosen by about 32% of respondents. Only a small fraction are actively replatforming or rehosting to a cloud environment.
Data warehousing and analytics tops workload growth, with API services close behind.
Data warehousing/analytics was cited as the fastest-growing workload by 31% of respondents. API and integration services came in second at 26%, followed by a tie between batch processing and security/compliance workloads.
Most organizations are confident in their backup infrastructure, but upgrades loom.
When asked how confident they are that their current backup and recovery infrastructure will support application and data growth, respondents were largely optimistic, but with caveats. About 42% said they are “very confident”—built for scale—while about 47% said they are “somewhat confident” but expect to need upgrades. Around 12% said they are not confident at all, reporting they are already hitting limits.
Storage exhaustion is the leading data protection pain point, but no single issue dominates.
Among the 39 respondents who reported a data protection challenge, backup storage capacity is regularly exhausted topped the list at 46%. Complexity of managing multiple backup tools and incomplete alerting, reporting, and backup compliance were each cited by 36% of respondents. Security issues in backup infrastructure affected 28%. The breadth of these challenges — spread fairly evenly across all four categories — suggests that data protection pain is multifaceted across the IBM Power community as workloads scale.
