As technology continues to evolve rapidly, business transformation is no longer aspirational—it’s a strategic imperative for many organizations, driving increased spending on cybersecurity, AI adoption, and infrastructure modernization.

Forming the foundation that enables every other digital transformation initiative, infrastructure modernization is drawing more attention from technology leaders in 2025. In fact, according to data published in the State of the CIO Survey 2025, 26% of CIOs responding to the survey were earmarking new funding for infrastructure modernization and migration. As organizations demand greater security, scalability, and operational efficiency, three key trends are reshaping how IT leaders approach infrastructure: hybrid and multi-cloud architectures, containerization, and Infrastructure-as-Code(IaC). While the specific drivers may vary by organization, the strategic advantages these trends deliver make them essential considerations for every IT leader.

1.  Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Architectures

Working with customers across a range of industries, we’re seeing many organizations benefit from hybrid and multi-cloud architectures that distribute workloads to reduce risk and maximize flexibility.

Key drivers for adoption:

Vendor lock-in – Avoiding vendor lock-in is a strategic priority for many IT leaders who have experienced the pitfalls of dependency on single vendors. By distributing workloads, organizations retain their negotiating power and the freedom to change providers

Risk management – By reducing the reach and impact of outages and security breaches, hybrid and multi-cloud architectures allow IT leaders to manage risk effectively.  

Regulatory requirements – Hybrid and multi-cloud architectures make it possible for organizations to meet regulations that require them to keep data in certain geographic locations.

Inherited infrastructure – IT departments often inherit environments with multiple cloud commitments through mergers and acquisitions, leaving them with hybrid and multi-cloud architectures.

Best-of-breed strategy – Technology teams pursuing best-of-breed strategies lean into distributed architectures to get the most out of the services in which different cloud providers excel.

Strategic advantages:

Negotiating power – By reducing their dependency on a single vendor, organizations are in a stronger position to negotiatepricing and terms across all providers.

Cost optimization – Running workloads where they’re most economical allows organizations to optimize thecost of their architecture investments. For instance, they might run predictable workloads on-premises and variable ones in the cloud.  

Resilience – Reducing the reach of system failures and breaches, hybrid and multi-cloud architectures improve resilience.

Flexibility – Modern distributed architectures give IT teams the flexibility to easily and efficiently move workloads based on performance, compliance, or evolving business needs.

Geographic and service advantages – Different providers have different strengths, whether they’re regional or service-based. By working with several providers, IT teams can take advantage of each of these strengths.

2.  Containerization

Containerization is another important trend in architecture modernization—one that we’ve helped many of our clients embrace in recent years. With widespread adoption, this trend has shifted the way organizations think about application architecture, the development process, and operational models.

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Key drivers for adoption:

Application modernization – As organizations feel the pressure to modernize their legacy monolithic applications that are hard to scale and update, microservices architectures powered by containerization offer a way to break applications into smaller services.

DevOps adoption – To accelerate the delivery of software, modern organizations have adopted DevOps practices and tools that break down silos between development and operations teams. These teams rely on containers to enable faster, more reliable deployment processes.

Resource efficiency – Using fewer resources than traditional virtual machines, containers help improve efficiency and reduce costs.

Cloud-native development – Containers were designed to meet the unique requirements of cloud-native development. Therefore, organizations building cloud-native applications are turning to containers for their lightweight, portable, and scalable deployment capabilities.

Strategic advantages:

Faster Time to market – Lightweight and portable, containerized applications can be deployed in just minutes instead of days.

Improved Resource utilization – Containers make it possible to run more applications on each server than virtual machines, reducing architecture costs.

Scalability – With containerization, applications are broken down into smaller services that can be scaled independently. This allows organizations to add capacity to individual components that see higher traffic, rather than entire applications.

Development velocity – Making it possible for developers to work on different services independently, containers accelerate development time.

Consistent environments – Packaging applications with all their dependencies in a single unit, containers ensure that applications run the same way in development, testing, and production. This eliminates failures due to subtle differences in operating systems, libraries, or configurations between these environments.

Simplified maintenance – Containerization makes it possible to update individual components without disruptions to entire applications, simplifying maintenance.

3.  Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC)

Navigating tight budgets and talent shortages, modern IT departments are under constant pressure to do more with less. Fortunately, automation makes it possible for teams to perform and standardize repeatable tasks, like managing and provisioning IT infrastructure. Infrastructure as Code(IaC) is replacing the manual processes associated with creating, modifying, and destroying infrastructure resources with code.

Key drivers for adoption:

Inefficiency – Provisioning tasks are often repetitive, taking up time that IT teams can spend on higher value tasks.

Configuration drift – Over time, traditional provisioning can result in inconsistencies in environments as manual changes are made.

Compliance and audit requirements – In some instances, compliance and regulatory requirements make it necessary for organizations to show documented, repeatable infrastructure processes.  

DevOps culture – As a result of the DevOps culture shift, infrastructure has become part of the software development lifecycle and the same practices are now being applied, including version control and code reviews.

Cloud adoption – Cloud platforms have made it possible to create, manage, and destroy infrastructure through API calls, making automation simple and practical.

Strategic advantages:

Reduced costs – By eliminating repetitive manual tasks, Infrastructure-as-Code allows teams to be more efficient.

Consistency – Automating provisioning tasks ensures that every environment is built the same way every time.

Disaster recovery – IaC makes it possible to rebuild entire environments in just minutes, enabling organizations to recover faster than ever before.

Security – With IaC, infrastructure code can be code-reviewed and version-controlled to ensure security gaps are patched effectively.

Compliance – With automated provisioning, organizations have an audit trail of infrastructure changes that proves their compliance with regulatory guidelines.

Agility – With IaC, teams can spin up new environments for testing, development, or scaling in minutes.  

Managing Complexity

Feeding into one another, these trends create a powerful foundation that supports business transformations built around flexibility, efficiency, and control. However, they also increase complexity by introducing diverse environments and architectures.

IT departments are under intense pressure to manage this complexity effectively to keep organizations compliant with regulations and maximize uptime for important services and applications. Fortunately, technology providers are responding with innovative solutions that integrate capabilities to support IT teams in managing these complex environments. For instance, Dell has recently evolved its Cloud Platform to DellPrivate Cloud and introduced the Dell Automation Platform. Together, these solutions allow organizations to build private clouds that are open, adaptable, and can seamlessly transition between cloud ecosystems. Leveraging automation, they simplify the deployment, management, and scalability of hybrid cloud ecosystems.

More interestingly, Dell is co-engineering these solutions with Red Hat, integrating Ansible and OpenShift. This extends the capabilities of Red Hat’s solutions with a shared layer that supports multi-vendor ecosystems.

We anticipate more integrated and co-engineered solutions to hit the market, giving customers more flexibility while helping them manage the growing complexity of modern enterprise IT architecture.    

Curious about how Dell and Red Hat’s co-engineered solutions empower hybrid cloud modernization? Register for our on-demand webinar, for expert insights on the advantages of these solutions from Dell, Red Hat, andMOBIA.

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