The state of hybrid cloud strategies in financial services

1. What are your organisation's primary motivations for adopting a hybrid cloud strategy? (Select two options)

Reducing costs
Increasing agility and flexibility
Meeting regulatory requirements
Enhancing data security
Driving innovation and speed to market
Improving operational resilience
Supporting digital transformation initiatives
Enabling scalability for future growth
Improving customer experience
Facilitating multi-cloud or cross-cloud strategies

2. Which of the following are the greatest barriers to successful hybrid cloud adoption in your organisation? (Select two options)

Integration with legacy systems
Security and compliance concerns
Skills and talent shortages
Managing costs
Vendor lock-in
Cultural resistance to change
Lack of unified visibility and observability across environments

3. Over the past three years, how has your organisation's approach to hybrid cloud changed, particularly regarding on-premises modernisation? (Select all that apply)

Increased use of public cloud
Increased use of private cloud or on-premises
Modernised on-premises infrastructure as part of hybrid strategy
Shifted workloads back from public to modernised on-premises environments
Increased focus on security and compliance
Increased focus on sustainability
Greater emphasis on managing shared responsibility between providers and internal teams
No significant change

4. How does your organisation ensure interoperability, unified management, and effective governance across on-premises and cloud environments? (Select all that apply)

Centralised governance framework managed by a dedicated team
Decentralised governance with individual business units responsible
Shared responsibility between IT and business units
Automated governance and management using policy-driven tools
Governance embedded within DevOps processes
Third-party integration tools for interoperability and management
Vendor-native solutions for unified management
Custom in-house development for integration or governance
Managed service providers (including for cost optimisation and unified management)
Unified observability or 360-degree telemetry platforms

5. How confident are you in your organisation's ability to maintain data security and meet shared-responsibility requirements across hybrid cloud environments? (Select one option)

Very confident
Fairly confident
Neutral
Slightly unconfident
Not at all confident
Unclear on shared-responsibility boundaries

6. What is your biggest compliance and shared-responsibility challenge in hybrid cloud?

Data residency and sovereignty
Meeting industry regulations (e.g., GDPR)
Managing audit trails and reporting
Ensuring consistent data protection policies
Keeping up with changing regulations
Lack of visibility across environments
Unclear division of shared responsibility between cloud providers and your organisation

7. How do you primarily manage and optimise costs across your hybrid cloud deployments? (Select one option)

Cloud provider tools
Third-party cost management solutions
Internal financial controls
Managed service providers
Regular manual reviews
We do not actively manage costs

8. Which aspects of cost management in hybrid cloud present the greatest challenges? (Select up to two options)

Forecasting and budgeting
Identifying unused or underutilised resources
Allocating costs across departments
Managing multi-cloud contracts
Tracking ongoing operational expenses
Chargeback and showback processes

9. In which ways has hybrid cloud enabled your organisation to innovate or launch new digital products or services? (Select all that apply)

Significantly accelerated time-to-market
Enabled new digital revenue streams
Improved ability to experiment or prototype
Enhanced customer experience
Somewhat slowed innovation
Significantly slowed innovation
Too early to say
No impact

10. What are the primary benefits your organisation has realised from hybrid cloud adoption? (Select up to two options)

Greater business agility
Improved operational resilience
Enhanced data security and compliance
Cost savings
Improved customer experience
Easier regulatory compliance
Better scalability

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