Dive Brief:

• Only one-quarter of IT infrastructure management professionals award their current infrastructure strategy an A grade, according to an INAP survey of more than 500 IT professionals. Nearly one in five respondents graded their strategy as a C or below.
• Nearly 90% of respondents said more workloads will migrate to the cloud by 2022. But companies exclusively using public cloud platforms, including AWS, Azure or Google, are "less likely to give themselves A's," compared to multicloud users, according to the report. Seventy percent of respondents said multicloud solutions have "made management easier to some extent." 
• Respondents with A grades say they only run an average of 30% of workloads on-prem. C grades and below have about 45% of workloads running on-prem. Components of colocation also contribute to 31% of professionals giving infrastructure an A grade.

Dive Insight:

Honest self-evaluations are important, especially when CEOs are waiting on a return on investment. But dated infrastructures, unequipped for timely modernization, will slow those gains further. 

The majority of IT professionals who say their strategy isn't A-worthy blamed an infrastructure unequipped for optimization and hours wasted on maintenance; a tale as old as time for IT. 

Some of the managers who graded their strategy below an A said their network is too slow and the infrastructure is unreliable or redundant, contributing to the risk of downtime. 

A bad software deployment runs the risk of an outage and even though the cloud is meant to alleviate that stress, wholly depending on a vendor's uptime is ill-advised. This leads to an additional layer of infrastructure skepticism.

Vendors aren't infallible either. Microsoft Office 365 experienced downtime Tuesday night because of a networking update. The company "reverted a networking build" that caused the failure. 

Always assuming a vendor will fail could mitigate any chaos their failure could cause. A multicloud strategy also helps because it allows companies to run applications and data storage through several cloud providers. 

Eighty-five percent of enterprises rely on a multicloud cloud environment, according to the IBM Institute for Business Value. Multicloud environments help shield companies from the chance of a single cloud provider's outage taking their customers down with them. 

Because more than half of IT managers expect an increase in data volume in the next year, a multicloud strategy will alleviate the burden of maintaining the influx. However, mission-critical operations, while not necessarily more secure in on-prem solutions, will keep on-prem from disappearing entirely.