Enterprise Workloads Infrastructure Stacks and Deployments

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Meet the Experts

Photo of Natalya Yezhkova
Natalya Yezhkova

Research Vice President, Enterprise and Emerging Workloads, Worldwide Infrastructure Research

Photo of Olga Yashkova
Olga Yashkova

Research Manager, Enterprise and Emerging Workloads, Worldwide Infrastructure Research



IDC's Enterprise Workloads Infrastructure Stacks and Deployments program provides insights into compute and storage infrastructure adoption, trends, and usage by enterprise workloads as defined in IDC's taxonomy (IDC defines a "workload" to be an application along with its data set). The program also analyzes workload placement strategies and workload movement across various deployment environments, including corporate datacenters, public cloud, and edge, along with infrastructure trends related to cloud-native workloads and containers. This program serves as a companion program to IDC's Worldwide Semiannual Enterprise Infrastructure Tracker: Workloads.


Markets and Subjects Analyzed


  • Qualitative and quantitative overview of workloads as defined in IDC's enterprise infrastructure workloads taxonomy
  • Qualitative and quantitative overview of workloads deployed on bare metal, virtualized, and containerized environments
  • Traditional (legacy and current generation) and newer (cloud native and next generation) workloads
  • Infrastructure for edge workloads
  • Use of accelerated and non-accelerated servers for enterprise workloads
  • Use of various storage systems types for enterprise workloads (e.g., all-flash, hybrid, and HDD-only storage)
  • Use of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) for serving enterprise workloads
  • Infrastructure stacks for next-gen workloads (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker, GKE, and PKS)
  • Cloud migration tools and development methodologies and paradigms
  • Operating system environments for enterprise workloads

Core Research


  • Worldwide Enterprise Infrastructure Workloads Taxonomy
  • Worldwide Enterprise Infrastructure Workloads Forecast
  • Compute and Storage Infrastructure Trends for Cloud-Native Workloads and Containers
  • Compute and Storage Infrastructure Trends for Edge Workloads
  • Workloads in Public Cloud IaaS and PaaS
  • Cloud Migration and Repatriation Trends

In addition to the insight provided in this service, IDC may conduct research on specific topics or emerging market segments via research offerings that require additional IDC funding and client investment.


Key Questions Answered


  1. How are workload deployments shifting in terms of supporting infrastructure on premises, in the public cloud, and at the edge? What changes do they go through when they shift?
  2. What kind of enabling infrastructure stacks are used when workloads get refactored, repackaged, or replatformed?
  3. What best practices are organizations using to evaluate, modernize, and transform their infrastructure for containerized and cloud-native workloads?
  4. What compute and storage functionality is needed for various workloads?
  5. What consumption models and deployment locations should be employed for superior business outcomes?