Two decades of haphazard purchasing of SaaS and public cloud services has left many Australian organisations neither fully in nor fully out of the cloud.

According to Forrester, 94 percent of Australian organisations now operate a hybrid cloud. For IT executives, these mixed environments bring complexity and risk, but also opportunities for optimising cost and performance when managed appropriately.

As an IT executive who dived into the cloud in its earliest days, the Australian Computer Society’s CIO Rich Wiltshire says most technology executives now have learned enough to make decisions about cloud workloads on merit alone.

“People are no longer in one court or another, they are just selecting the right work products based on their experience and the cuts and bruises they have taken throughout the infancy of it,” Wiltshire said.

“Grab what is most important to you – and it is always data – build that in a sacred temple, and move your workload out to areas that are efficient or suit the modern era.”

One executive who is working hard to ease the management burden of a hybrid environment is Greg Wratt, IT manager for ANZ at the global speciality coffee company UCC Coffee Australia & New Zealand.

When Wratt joined UCC in 2022 he inherited an environment that had already undergone several attempts at cloud migration, including one which subsequently led to workloads being repatriated back out again.

Today much of UCC’s data sits on cloud-hosted file servers with various older applications running on-premises. Wratt’s vision is to do away with server infrastructure and its associated overheads altogether, such as those associated with routine tasks such as patching.

“For every critical update that is deployed, we have to evaluate that patch and we have to schedule downtime for the entire business – it is just not worth it,” Wratt said.

Unfortunately for Wratt and his team, the likelihood of achieving his goal any time soon is slim. UCC’s operations rely on customised legacy applications that pre-date cloud platforms, and Wratt says the cost, disruption, and risk involved in modernisation and migrating to alternate providers is something that he isn’t prepared to wear at this time.

“A lot of products that are in use here are based on really old code,” Wratt said.

“They are still very network heavy, and so they are clunky, and they don’t have web interfaces. The developers of those legacy apps need to wake up and see that the future has already started, and they are running behind.”

Modernisation is clearly on the mind of many technology executives, with data from Forrester finding 53 percent of Australian enterprise cloud decision-makers expected to prioritise modernisation with cloud and new computing architectures over the next 12 months.

For now, Wratt will focus on taking the easy wins of cloud migration and empower staff at UCC to use applications already bundled with their current cloud services.

Another IT executive who share’s Wratt’s vision is Paul Keen, chief technology officer at the Australian payments and banking solution provider Tyro. Keen says Tyro is currently deploying to production 45 times a day, which presents challenges for its existing hybrid cloud environment.

Keen suggests reasons such as this, rather than cost, are why he wants to migrate as many workloads as possible into the public cloud.

“We just did the final business case on whether we would buy another set of hardware or go to the cloud, and overall we found it (the cloud) to be slightly more expensive,” Keen said.

 “But it’s about the total cost of ownership. It is about moving as fast as we possibly can, because one attribute that every company shares is moving faster is an advantage.”

Not all organisations are so willing to forego their private infrastructure, however.

Former REA group chief technology officer Tom Varsavsky believes a backlash against cloud costs has led some to reconsider on-premises scenarios for specific workloads.

However, he cautions that for most scenarios, the overall value of the public cloud often outweighs that cost benefit of operating a hybrid environment.

“You may be able to do it cheaper, but the human capital and energy that is going to go into that is a missed opportunity to spend it on something else that maybe is more differentiating for the business,” he said.

Meanwhile, Gartner research vice president Michael Warrilow says hybrid clouds are finding favour in emerging models such as industry, sovereign, and edge cloud services, which are designed to avoid much of the management burden of older hybrid deployments.

By 2025, Gartner estimates that more than 50 percent of enterprises will use a distributed cloud option associated with their primary integrated cloud infrastructure and platform service, up from 40 percent in 2022.

“Distributed hybrid infrastructure promises to make it possible to have cloud-inspired infrastructure located wherever the organisation wants it – in a hospital, a submarine or even in an air-gapped environment,” Warrilow said.