For established businesses, the debate is settled: a hybrid cloud approach is the right strategic choice.  

However, while embracing hybrid cloud might be intrinsic, clients continually seek to derive business value and higher return on investment (ROI) from their investments. According to a study conducted by HFS Research in partnership with IBM Consulting®, only 25% of surveyed enterprises have reported solid ROI on business outcomes from their cloud transformation efforts.  

The lack of ROI progress can be attributed to several factors, including slow adoption, unrealized use cases and unaddressed cloud sprawl. This is exacerbated by the increasing challenges of platform scaling, skilling, cybersecurity and the explosion of data volumes.  
 
Businesses aiming to derive value from business outcomes through their cloud investments and harness the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) must adopt an intentional approach. 

At IBM, we provide clear guidance for navigating these challenges and achieving better business outcomes. Adopting a hybrid by design strategy allows organizations to align architectural choices with business priorities across technology, platforms, processes and people, resulting in significantly enhanced outcomes and a higher ROI. 

The latest paper from IBM, titled “Maximize the value of hybrid cloud in the generative AI era,” offers clarity for businesses seeking to optimize their hybrid cloud architecture and amplify the impact of generative AI (gen AI).  

What does a Hybrid by design approach involve?  

Many organizations have adopted cloud in isolated areas, seeking immediate benefits, but inconsistently applying the technology throughout their operations. This complexity and inconsistency increase costs and hinder businesses from meeting demands, goals and outcomes. We view this as a default approach, which characterizes most companies today.  

Businesses must recalibrate transformation programs to align more closely with business imperatives and outcomes. They must also recognize how gen AI can amplify the value of hybrid cloud and accelerate digital transformation.  

A hybrid by design approach intentionally structures your hybrid, multicloud IT estate to achieve key business priorities and maximize ROI. Organizations can shift from technology dictating business limitations to purposefully built architectures ready for evolving technology landscapes, new business and customer demands, and emerging processes and skill requirements. Driven by an organization’s key business objectives, intentional and consistent architectural decisions enable organizations to fully use hybrid cloud and gen AI to drive business outcomes. 

IBM built a codified framework to help clients strategically focus on decisions that drive the most outcomes for their business, promoting a hybrid by design approach. This framework facilitates the translation of business priorities into key architectural decisions.  

We implement this framework by aligning business objectives with a set of decision points across 3 domains: product native by design, technology by design and integration by design. These domains also encompass various design points. Each enterprise situation requires different levels of capabilities to address and achieve its business objectives. This value framework aids in capturing these decision points.  

In an AI-centric world, why does this matter for enterprises? 

Gen AI plays a critical role in shaping the digital enterprise, helping to maximize business returns on IT investments. However, wide-scale adoption and deployment of gen AI present challenges. Enterprises must manage vast volumes of data, significant computing power, advanced security architecture across distributed environments and ensure rapid scalability.  

An intentional and consistent hybrid architecture design helps enterprises to overcome these challenges, facilitating the successful adoption and scalability of gen AI capabilities to meet business needs.  

Current pilots and deployments prove that a hybrid by design approach is required to scale the adoption of gen AI to meet business needs. Gen AI accelerates the execution and value of hybrid cloud by providing enhanced automation with observability, improved cost optimization with automated insights, and heightened security with compliance across the hybrid platform. 

Applying intentional architecture decisions based on business needs amplifies the value of hybrid cloud and AI, driving business outcomes. 

Want to learn more? Connect with the hybrid cloud and AI team at IBM.