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Polls taken in December 2012 for the Gartner data center conference showed an interesting confluence with a similar poll taken for the December 2009 conference. The data for hybrid cloud adoption collected in 2012 lined up very closely to the data collected for private cloud adoption in 2009. This could indicate that hybrid cloud technology is on its way to becoming mainstream in the enterprise.
Gartner's poll typically includes decision makers from larger organizations. They're frequently involved in the infrastructure and operating areas of their company's IT team, so they are likely to have a good sense of where the company is going. They also are in a position to influence the company's strategy. In 2009, 76 percent of people polled thought that their companies would have a private cloud strategy by 2012; only four 4 percent thought that their company would not. When the same group was polled in 2012 about their projections for hybrid clouds in 2015, 70 percent thought their company would have a strategy and just seven percent thought that their company wouldn't.
This doesn't necessarily mean that the enterprise space will become saturated with hybrid clouds. Of the 76 percent of IT professionals who wanted private clouds, only 44 percent had deployed one, and an additional 28 percent planned a deployment by the end of 2014. One unsurprising conclusion from this data set is that organizations don't always do what their IT team wants them to.
Nevertheless, it seems clear that, if past history is a predictor of future IT development, the next three years will see hybrid clouds that bridge public and private systems becoming more important in the enterprise IT space. While it's probably unlikely to assume that 70 percent of companies will be using the hybrid could by then, it's likely that a large proportion of them will be.