Amid the chaotic arena of cloud migrations and modernization, a hybrid approach to cloud modernization is becoming the norm, according to Forrester analysts.

"What we're seeing is a transformation from that old lift and shift type of motion that initially characterized cloud," paving the way for a more combined approach, Principal Analyst Lee Sustar said during a webinar.

The cloud isn't a place, he argued. Public cloud doesn't mean there, and on-prem doesn't mean here. "It's actually a way of working," Sustar said.

The set of technologies that originated in the cloud and brought scalability and flexibility based on open source and Kubernetes can also be used to modernize the data center, he explained.

"A lot of times we're seeing people modernize in place" by "looking at container platforms as a way to modernize their infrastructure before moving to the cloud," he said. Or, enterprises modernize at the same time as they migrate to cloud. "Both approaches really set the stage for hybrid," he added.

To that point, he explained the choices enterprises have to make around cloud migration and modernization aren't as cut and dry as in the cloud's earlier days. "It's not this binary choice that it might have seemed once upon a time, where you either have to be on the cloud or on the data center. The hybrid approach is actually really becoming the norm," Sustar said.

A major driver of this shift was the pandemic. "Of course, there was no way to stand up a lot of resources quickly other than to go to the cloud, especially if remote work was something that was new" for an organization.

Enterprise efforts to push migration forward resulted in a lot of spending that played a significant role in propelling innovation, according to Sustar. "The sheer shift in emphasis towards cloud and away from data center forced innovation, forced the pace of new development, forced the move into containerized applications, into production. Experimentations from Kubernetes starting to go actually live. This was a huge impetus towards modernization," he explained.

After realizing the value and potential in cloud native, organizations were left with the question of how to continue to do this while scaling. Containers make app development quicker and easier because they combine applications and their dependencies into one package, but "the question, of course, is then how do you scale that out?"

"The Kubernetes infrastructure, based on cloud native and open source, has been a key foundation of that. And it's something that has been around for several years now, but is now really starting to go much more mainstream, and this pace of containerized applications and modernization [is] a proxy for the embrace of cloud native and modernization," Sustar said.