Hybrid clouds can increase agility, boost innovation cycles, and streamline scalability. But data fragmentation can derail everything.
The appeal of cloud environments is undeniable: increased agility, rapid innovation cycles, and the ability to easily scale applications globally.
Not surprisingly, enterprises are jumping aboard. In Foundry’s 2025 “Cloud Computing Study,” 70% of the participating IT leaders said their organization has accelerated cloud migration in the past year, and nearly three-quarters of next year’s IT budgets will be allocated to cloud initiatives.
But as enterprises expand workloads across public clouds, a different reality often emerges — one that calls for an intelligent data infrastructure. For example, data inconsistency and the absence of a well-architected framework cause challenges. In fact, according to the cloud computing study, 44% view complexity as a major downside of multicloud environments. Another 31% worry about security challenges and the rising costs of cloud management.
This is the quiet threat of data fragmentation — and it can undermine the very benefits the cloud was meant to deliver.
How data fragmentation undermines AI at scale
Today’s cloud strategies evolved quickly, driven by mandates to migrate fast and modernize even faster. But that rapid adoption often did not come with a cohesive data strategy. Teams selected services independently, mergers added more complexity, and legacy infrastructure remained unchanged while cloud usage accelerated.
Which brings us to the current state: siloed storage services; incompatible data formats; and a patchwork of backup, governance, and mobility tools. As a result, IT teams lack visibility into where data lives, how secure it is, and how efficiently it’s being used.
Fragmentation affects core business outcomes in several important ways:
- Reduced agility: Scattered data creates incompatibility issues across IT environments.
- Increased risk: Inconsistent governance and duplicated data copies erode security.
- Inability to scale AI: Disconnected data sets limit access to the large, clean, unified data that AI systems require.
- Operational drag: IT spends more time copying data, managing redundant tools, and stitching together inconsistent environments.
These issues are so significant that 53% of IT leaders plan to move or have already moved workloads back on-premises due to security concerns, and 48% are doing so to control costs, according to the Foundry cloud study. One-third (33%) said a lack of a unified platform for securing cloud and on-premises data has slowed cloud adoption altogether.
It shouldn’t be this way; organizations should be able to accelerate cloud migrations — and business value — with a unified data platform.
Operate in the cloud without trade-offs
Enterprises shouldn’t abandon the cloud. Rather, they need to find a smarter solution that increases agility, accelerates innovation cycles, and easily scales workloads and applications.
The right unified data platform delivers an intelligent data infrastructure that:
- Manages data consistently across on-premises, hybrid, and multicloud environments
- Delivers deep, native integration across all major clouds — AWS, Azure, Google Cloud — plus on-prem infrastructure
- Enables efficient data mobility that enables IT to easily copy, clone, and tier data across the entire hybrid environment to avoid latency issues, operational bottlenecks, and added costs
- Provides single-window data observability that lets IT teams know where data lives, how it behaves, and what it costs
- Includes built-in security and intelligent data governance that happens automatically at the data layer
The power of unification
A unified data platform provides the power for intelligent data infrastructure that adapts to change, automates protection, and optimizes performance and cost everywhere data lives. The platform eliminates silos; restores mobility; and delivers the clean, governed, high-quality data that modern AI initiatives demand. Significantly, it gives CIOs the consistency and control needed to scale innovation without reintroducing complexity — so the cloud can finally deliver on its promise.
Learn more about the NetApp data platform — the unified, enterprise-grade foundation for intelligent data infrastructure.