The study highlights that the widespread adoption of cloud services has significantly impacted enterprise data center infrastructure requirements, and that this complexity will be further exacerbated by the Internet of Things (IoT) and ever-increasing edge computing workloads. The path to the hybrid data center—combining off-premises services, such as public cloud and colocation, with privately owned on-premises data centers—poses a challenge to traditional infrastructure management and monitoring methods.
As different cloud services are deployed, multiple consequences are unfolding for businesses. Business models are changing, while the demand for connectivity and workload management is increasing. Managing diverse data center environments has become one of the most complex challenges for leading companies, forcing them to reconsider their strategies and best practices.

The study identified several common strategic keys among the companies interviewed:
• Choosing the best location: Location significantly impacts the risk, cost, and performance of IT services, all else being equal. For example, a UK retail company realized that the necessary security, performance, and latency requirements also needed to be considered in the total cost analysis, along with data traffic and licensing costs. These combined parameters helped determine the ideal mix of colocation and public cloud computing infrastructure to meet connectivity needs while controlling costs.
• Prioritizing visualization in hybrid environments: Achieving accurate visualization of information from multiple locations is a major challenge. The process is time-consuming and expensive, and encounters obstacles such as software silos and the availability of truly relevant data. •
Managing costs without sacrificing performance: Hybrid data center costs can be very high. However, with proper planning, it is possible to reduce them while maintaining or even improving availability in hybrid environments.
• Unify operational processes in hybrid IT environments: Developing strict operational processes is crucial, and it's essential to ensure these requirements are part of service-level agreements (SLAs) and operational level agreements (OLAs) with colocation and cloud service providers.
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