Cloud adoption has become one of the most important part of the IT agenda nowadays. The number of enterprises shifting to the cloud infrastructure is continuously increasing, to gain from cloud benefits like scalability, flexibility, and to achieve business benefits like agility, growth, and cost effectiveness.
OpsRamp, the hybrid cloud IT operations management company, recently surveyed 137 US-based IT decision makers (working at organizations with 500+ employees), to find out the state of cloud adoption, how cloud infrastructure services are bringing about a change in the IT spending, workload placement and sourcing strategies.
Per OpsRamp, the emergence of ‘cloud-first enterprises’ underlines the willingness of the organizations to use cloud to drive greater efficiency, innovation, and productivity.
“The survey results are consistent with what we’re hearing from customers and partners,” says Varma Kunaparaju, co-founder and CEO, OpsRamp. “Cloud is becoming a bigger part of their IT portfolio, they’re likely to use more than one cloud platform, and oversight and management of cloud services is paramount. We expect these trends to accelerate over time, as the cost, scalability and flexibility advantages of cloud services become even more obvious.”
The report found that the continuous growth in cloud adoption is leading to a new type of enterprise that’s comfortable with a ‘cloud-first’ approach.
Here are the five major trends that show how enterprises are implementing the cloud-first approach to drive business transformation.
1. Embracing cloud instead of datacenters
All the IT enterprises who were surveyed were using public cloud services in some form, with 90% of them using them for at least a year, while 7% for over seven years.
Over 84% enterprises planned to move high amount of their workloads to cloud in next two years, while 16% expected to move within next 5 years. Although the timing may differ, but public cloud seems to be an unstoppable growth engine.
Some of the enterprises were still in the process of figuring out the process of migration, management, and optimization of cloud workloads.
While 71% of the organizations felt that they are either at the emerging or developing state of cloud maturity, only 29% thought themselves to be mature at cloud adoption.
2. Rapid rise in the cloud native infrastructure
Dev and test workloads have always been the driving factors for organizations to move to the cloud. But, now it’s clear that it offers much more than just staging environment. The cloud infrastructure fulfills the enterprise demands for availability, speed, reliability, and cost-effectiveness. The organizations are adopting the cloud for following reasons:
- 40% for production environments
- 32% for development and testing
- 20% for recovery
- 62% for scalability and flexibility
- 47% for reducing capital expenditure
- 47% for consumption based pricing models
3. Cloud-based budgets
Cost saving is a big reason behind increased public cloud adoption. 94% stated that they plan to use on-demand public clouds so that they can reduce the infrastructure setup and maintenance costs.
Public cloud is found to be grabbing a major share of IT budgets. 95% of the respondents were found to have invested about 10% of their IT budgets on the public cloud, while 60% had invested over 30% for the same.
More than 80% planned to invest over 30% on cloud infrastructure with in next few years.
4. Multi-cloud is the way to go
Enterprises are sensibly dealing with the cloud sourcing. 75% of the respondents stated that they expect to use different cloud providers as per their business needs. The reasons to prefer multi-cloud included the need to avoid vendor lock-in, and ability to use specific providers for a use case, like Google Cloud for big data.
The survey found that most number of enterprises preferred either AWS (34%, highest), Microsoft Azure, Google, IBM, or Oracle Cloud services when it comes to IaaS platforms.
- Security concerns rank as top barrier to cloud adoption
The survey also found that despite the rapid growth in cloud adoption, some enterprises still felt that there are several barriers to adopting it.
Security (58%) was found to be the most common concern as the barrier to cloud adoption, followed by lack of right internal resources (19%) to manage cloud infrastructure, and cloud migrations (15%).
OpsRamp concluded that the ‘cloud-first’ strategy will transform the business outcomes with shorter time to market, faster customer feedback, and higher profitability.
Read the full report here.
