What is the future of hybrid cloud for businesses?

Although many CIOs and other IT executives are still aiming to be 100% cloud and are moving in that direction, advisers say many organizations need to build a strategy that reflects their needs to retain some applications on premises.

“There was an initial rush to the cloud and people felt like that was where they wanted to be, but while the cloud has tons of promise, it’s for the right workload, but not every workload,” Caulfield said.

Randy Armknecht, managing director and emerging technologies and global cloud practice leader at the consulting firm Protiviti, said he works with only a few organizations that have their entire technology stack in the cloud and are pursuing a multi-cloud strategy to spread their workloads across different providers.

Others, he said, still have private data centers or private clouds where they keep some workloads both Whatever the mix, Armknecht and other IT advisers said organizations should be clear about what should be on premises, what should be in the cloud and what should move from one to the other by using a cloud decision framework to determine whether to replace, rebuild, refactor, rehost, retain or retire applications.