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The good news: enterprises are beginning to use technologies such as software defined networking (SDN) and containers in production scenarios. Yet according to a new study from Dimension Data, management of hybrid IT environments remains a key challenge with automation the key.

The report, which polled 1,500 IT decision makers across four continents, found different motivators by region for utilising hybrid IT defined here as the usage of multiple deployment models to deliver a single workload or application as part of their data centre and cloud strategies from end-user demand in the UK, US and Hong Kong, to cost for respondents in France, Singapore and South Africa.

Almost half of respondents (48%) said their migration processes were manual and labour-intensive as a result while 38% said they use automation for quicker application migration. Hybrid IT is a becoming a standard enterprise model, but theres no single playbook to get there, the company warns.

44% of respondents said they found it challenging to migrate workloads to new locations, as well as assessing which option was best for a particular workload.

With data and processes shifting across multiple cloud and non-cloud environments, a new approach to management is called for, said Jason Goodall, Dimension Data group CEO. IT managers are under tremendous pressure to seek new ways to manage and secure multiple IT environments in an effective manner.

Automation is important because it helps reduce the operating costs, as well as the pain caused by the growing complexity of business processes and management tasks, Goodall added. It is simply no longer appropriate or cost-effective for these tasks to be done manually.

Speaking to this publication this time last year, Michael Allen, VP EMEA at digital performance monitoring provider Dynatrace, said very few enterprises were actively doing SDN and software defined data centres, but many were looking at it. From this research, it would appear small steps are at least being made.

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Hybrid IT becoming 'standard enterprise model' but playbook still being worked out - Cloud Tech