In October of 2018, IBM acquired Red Hat for USD 33bn and became, in their own words the ‘world’s number one hybrid cloud provider.’ According to CEO Gini Rometty, it is now “offering companies the only open cloud solution that will unlock the full value of the cloud for their businesses.”

Amazon Web Services (AWS) also released Outpost in November of 2018, making it much more cloud friendly. AWS had always been extremely keen on having every app available in

their cloud, but it seems their customers have been sending a different message. Despite the growth of cloud computing, many people will still have applications running on their own data centers. Customers are using multiple vendors, taking advantage of the best options available for each individual workload.

This opens the door to a hybrid cloud market. According to a report from MarketsandMarkets, the Hybrid Cloud market will be worth almost $100bn by 2023 growing at a compound annual rate of 17 percent. It is driven, according to the report, by customer demand for agile, scalable and cost-efficient computing.

Multi-cloud environments are becoming the default option among many companies looking to provide themselves with maximum flexibility and avoid vendor lock-in. Security concerns with the arrival of GDPR also encourage users to opt for the best and most reliable performer for each workload. Cloud providers are taking note and positioning themselves to offer a much more hybrid cloud-friendly service for 2019. On the other hand, companies are increasingly aware of the benefits they can reap from the scalability and pay-per-use economics that the public cloud provides, but they are also waking up to the realization that not all clouds are equal. The decision to switch to a blend of clouds is hardly surprising: not only are these companies now benefiting as they house each app they deploy in the best possible environment, but this application-centric approach to IT is also going a long way to avoid dreaded vendor and platform lock-in issues.