Modern enterprise IT infrastructures are complex beasts. They grow and morph organically over time and have likely undergone one, if not more, significant point-in-time transformations.

For the past couple of years, no one has been able to escape the effects of supply chain problems throughout their personal and professional lives. According to our recent State of Hybrid Cloud Storage survey, storage and the IT equipment that supports storage systems were no exception, and disruptions created extra work and headaches for those teams.

According to Virtana’s recent State of Hybrid Cloud Storage survey, most organizations have a little over half of their storage in the cloud, keeping the rest on premises. But how are they deciding what storage goes where? Is there such a thing as a wrong—or even just sub-optimal—storage placement decision? We dug into the data to answer these questions.

Too often, when organizations migrate workloads to the cloud or build new cloud-native applications, they don’t really think about storage. The cloud provider takes care of all that, right? Well, yes and no. There are cost implications to cloud storage that many don’t adequately anticipate—until they get the bill, that is.

Most sentences that include both on premises and cloud usually put the word “or” between them, or perhaps “vs.” But most enterprises operate in the world of “and.” In other words, they have workloads on premises and in the cloud—and that little three-letter word makes a world of difference.

Enterprises are increasingly adopting Kubernetes. In fact, Gartner estimates that by 2026 more than 90% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production, an increase from fewer than 40% in 2020. And IDC reports that 80% of new workloads are being developed in containers.

Have you considered cloud portability, i.e., the ability to easily move workloads between on-premises systems and across multiple cloud service providers (CSPs)? The idea is that workloads should run in the environment that delivers the most value for your organization, but as that “optimal” environment can change over time, you need to be able to move your workloads accordingly.

Digital transformation, no matter what form it takes within your organization, is a high-stakes initiative to deliver strategic impact to the business. The cloud is a pivotal enabler to that effort. But there’s a flip side—challenges related to migrating and managing workloads in the cloud can have a negative impact on the success of your transformation efforts.

Given the strategic importance of the cloud and size of cloud expenditures, it’s critical for enterprises to have solid controls in place to manage it all. According to our latest research, however, while most organizations agree with that sentiment, very few have put it into practice. There are distinct but related disciplines that come into play: FinOps and cloud governance. In this two-part series, we explore current state of each.

Given the strategic importance of the cloud and size of cloud expenditures, it’s critical for enterprises to have solid controls in place to manage it all. According to our latest research, however, while most organizations agree with that sentiment, very few have put it into practice. There are distinct but related disciplines that come into play: FinOps and cloud governance. In this two-part series, we explore current state of each.