Since commercial cloud offerings went mainstream roughly 20 years ago, businesses have explored a variety of architectural strategies to optimize their use of it. From its earliest days, cloud computing promised to reduce costs and increase infrastructure flexibility and scalability. It would free businesses from having to run their own data centers and allow them to focus instead on their core business and innovation.
Because of these expected benefits, many businesses began to adopt cloud-first strategies in the 2010s, hoping to accelerate cloud adoption. A growing number of cloud-native companies were launched, SaaS applications proliferated, and migration to the cloud became almost synonymous with IT modernization. Cloud adoption soared further in the early 2020s when the pandemic drove most of the population online, and clouds have been aggressively adding new services in recent years to stay competitive in an increasingly AI-driven world.
Cloud computing has no doubt been a transformative technology throughout the 21st century, but as it matures, enterprises have begun developing more nuanced views of how to optimize their use of it. While cost control motivated cloud-first strategies, many businesses learned the hard way that cloud computing doesn’t necessarily save them money. In fact, the hidden costs of cloud have led to repatriation of many cloud workloads: About one-fifth of cloud data and workloads have been moved back on-premises according to a recent survey.[1]
Most organizations now recognize that finding the right balance around costs, performance, flexibility, data privacy, data sovereignty and compliance ultimately requires the use of multiple public clouds as well as private infrastructure. Multicloud is already a norm, and of the 86% of enterprises using multiple clouds, a full 70% of them embrace hybrid cloud strategies today,[2] a number that’s expected to grow. Gartner® predicts that 90% of organizations will adopt a hybrid cloud approach through 2027.[3] With the increasing importance of data security and privacy, regulatory compliance, and infrastructure cost balancing, it’s time for enterprises to move away from cloud-first to hybrid-first strategies.
Change is the only constant in IT
Consider the trajectory of many cloud-first plans initiated just a few years ago: CIOs who created a five-year plan in 2019 were likely to focus on a cloud-first infrastructure strategy. But three years into that plan, the IT world had already seen massive disruption due to the global pandemic shutdowns and supply chain disruptions, the release of the first generative AI tools, and significant mergers and acquisitions of foundational infrastructure players. These three inflection points alone would render any plan initiated in 2019 woefully inadequate for today’s requirements.
While the recent past may seem remarkable, over the last 20 years, any five-year period has had similar inflection points. Meanwhile, alongside an ever-changing technology landscape, the regulatory environment is also undergoing massive change, with new data regulations increasing every year. Global enterprises need to comply with all these regulations, while protecting their data and being prepared for an uncertain future.
It’s an understatement to say that flexibility is a necessity in enterprise IT. If change is only accelerating, it’s imperative that businesses be prepared for unexpected futures, and hybrid infrastructure is the best way to do that.
With a hybrid-first approach, you can take advantage of the best of all worlds, tailoring infrastructure choices to the evolving requirements of each workload. Use public clouds and specialized service providers like GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) companies for workloads that require more elasticity, for development and innovation, and to utilize specialized cloud-based tools. Use private infrastructure for sensitive data, regulated workloads such as those that are subject to data sovereignty laws, and authoritative copies of data that you want to maintain full control over.
Hybrid by design
As much as we talk about the need for agility in IT, often, decisions made to address the challenge of the moment end up limiting our ability to respond to change later. This may have been the case with many cloud-first plans made in the last decade. With a hybrid-first approach, companies are better positioned to balance operational costs and performance, to operate securely and reliably, and to innovate for the future—giving them a clear competitive advantage.
When your architecture is hybrid by design, you can maximize flexibility and make the best use of data, your most valuable resource. Our recommended approach to a hybrid architecture is to keep an authoritative copy of your data in your core private infrastructure, where it can be easily accessed in, or replicated to, all the places you need, including public clouds and specialized service providers, both now and in the future.
With this approach to hybrid multicloud, you always have one foot in and one foot out of the cloud, which empowers you to use clouds strategically, without the risk of vendor lock-in. Well-known and tested data motion patterns enable you to move data where it’s needed to take advantage of cloud and other services on-demand, while simultaneously mitigating transit or egress charges and significantly reducing the time required to move a large dataset. Your core infrastructure serves as a pivot point, allowing you to more easily optimize costs and performance. You can also design a hybrid architecture to accommodate regulatory compliance right from the start.
Plan your future-proof hybrid architecture today
Equinix high-performance data centers offer several advantages as a home for a hybrid multicloud infrastructure:
- Direct cloud connections: More cloud on-ramps than any other provider in the world
- Interconnection-ready: Easy high-speed private connectivity to not just thousands of clouds but also SaaS solutions, network services and other IT providers
- Hybrid multicloud networking: Simplified networking solutions from any cloud to any cloud, public or private
- Global reach: 260+ data centers in 74 markets around the world, everywhere you need to be
While there are lots of ways to design a hybrid architecture, Equinix can help companies execute a hybrid strategy all in one place, positioning them to be agile and competitive in an unpredictable future—something that’s no longer possible with a cloud-first or cloud-only strategy.
Learn more about building a simplified hybrid multicloud architecture with Equinix by downloading our solution brief.
[1] Flexera State of the Cloud Report 2025.
[2] Flexera State of the Cloud Report 2025.
[3] Gartner Press Release, Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Public Cloud End-User Spending to Total $723 Billion in 2025, November 19, 2024.
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