Thanks to fast-moving developments in AI, cloud adoption is set to skyrocket. But enabling AI requires more than just expanding computing power — it means modernizing how cloud infrastructure is fundamentally deployed, governed, and managed. For some organizations, this requires “fixing” many current cloud practices without creating so much disruption that teams are stymied and innovation suffers.

By 2027, Gartner predicts 90% of organizations will adopt hybrid cloud models — in many cases to meet the explosive demand of AI — which adds additional complexity to an already complicated operating environment.

What are the steps your organization should take to manage hybrid cloud without adding more friction to your innovation workflows?

»The current operating state

The early days of cloud were exciting. The allure of on-demand compute resources and unlimited scalability drove many organizations forward, encouraging developers to experiment freely. As a result, teams raced to deploy applications as fast as possible.

This delivered results, fast. But it also created a complex operating environment filled with a fragmented landscape of tools, inconsistent processes, and security risks. Teams within the same organizations often operated very differently, using different toolsets, provisioning infrastructure in their own way, and — maybe the riskiest practice of all — applying their own unique interpretation of security policies.

The downside of this complexity?

• Tool sprawl is almost inevitable; misconfigurations are common (creating potential vulnerabilities)
• Securing secrets is challenging (account compromise is one of the leading causes of breaches)
• Cloud ROI (what business leaders seek the most) has been elusive

According to Gartner,

• Unrealistic expectations, suboptimal implementation, and/or uncontrolled costs will cause 25% of organizations to be significantly dissatisfied with their cloud adoption by 2028
• Over 50% will not get the expected results from their multi-cloud implementations by 2029

The reality for most organizations is that infrastructure and security teams need fewer tools along with consistent processes in order to scale hybrid cloud infrastructure safely and efficiently.

»Empowering platform teams

For organizations to advance in cloud maturity, it’s clear that leaders must change how infrastructure, security, and development teams work together. Those that are excelling are using platform engineering teams combined with proper toolsets and standardized workflows to bring a greater measure of control to infrastructure management and implement safeguards where AI use cases can flourish.

By 2026, 80% of large software organizations will implement platform teams, a 35% increase in just four years.

Platform teams operate differently than traditional internal teams. They don’t simply build tools for others to use — they produce fully formed products. The platform team is a centralized group responsible for building and maintaining the internal developer platform leveraged by dev teams across an organization. The team’s objective is to deliver:

• Standardized infrastructure (across any cloud or hybrid estate)
• Reusable services
• Consistent workflows

These enable developers to accelerate delivery without concern over infrastructure vulnerabilities, because security and proper guardrails are embedded by default.

In this model, platform teams act like connective tissue between developers and security teams. Developers demand faster, self-service access to infrastructure. Security teams push for consistency and control. And platform engineers bridge the two by delivering products that satisfy the needs of both.

For platform teams to succeed, however, they need unified infrastructure and security lifecycle management. The Infrastructure Cloud from HashiCorp gives them that.

The Infrastructure Cloud bridges silos and provides a unified control plane for delivering hybrid cloud infrastructure. Instead of fragmented environments and snowflake tools and workflows, teams use a hybrid-cloud supporting suite of products to bridge together all their environments — public cloud, private cloud, legacy, and on-premises — using one interface and standard workflows for every environment and workload. This includes mainframe (IBM Z just added integrations with the Infrastructure Cloud suite), bare metal, virtual machines, containers, serverless, and more.

This unified platform creates an abstraction layer that makes deploying to the hybrid cloud a lot less complex. Different environment admins can build their own special steps and guardrails into the platform without needing to know all the intricacies of other environments supported by the platform, because the intricacies are handled by the platform’s abstraction layer.

For developers, this makes their job easier. They can provision through HashiCorp Terraform (a component of the Infrastructure Cloud) regardless of whether they are deploying to a mainframe or to a cloud provider. They can simply pick from a menu of tested and verified modules (or products) for their use case, and then go. Images can be managed in HCP Packer, and secrets and session authentication can be implemented and managed by default through Vault and Boundary (respectively) regardless of environment.

Empowering platform teams with The Infrastructure Cloud standardizes infrastructure and security lifecycle management, increases visibility across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, and accelerates software delivery while strengthening security and compliance. This enables organizations to scale hybrid cloud environments rapidly, automating many lower-level tasks through standardized workflows as demand for computing resources grows. As a result, their teams will be working in optimized hybrid cloud environments that both scale easily and allow them to fully realize the ROI of their cloud transformation.

»Learn more

As an IBM company, HashiCorp continues to invest in additional functionality to help platform teams and developers deliver innovation. For more information on HashiCorp’s vision for expanding unified lifecycle management for hybrid cloud operations:

• Read our press release
• Read our Do cloud right with The Infrastructure Cloud white paper
• Chat with us