Conducted by Quocirca on behalf of Nutanix, the survey of 400 IT directors and strategists across the UK, Germany, France and the Netherlands discovered that while most organisations are now using some form of cloud computing, there remain significant concerns over key factors including integration, total cost of ownership and security. The report data also suggests that hybrid cloud is not being deployed as quickly as some proponents suggest because of persistent obstacles.
While many progressive CIOs proclaim that their organisations look at cloud as the default option when deploying new services, just 12 per cent of survey respondents say they have adopted a ‘’cloud first” posture. And while most current cloud users are increasing their dependency on cloud, a significant minority are actually shrinking their cloud deployments (two per cent for public cloud, 10 per cent for private cloud, seven per cent for mixed cloud and 11 per cent for hybrid cloud).
“While the message championed by many interested parties is that the world is moving to various clouds, our numbers paint a more complex picture,” said Chris Kaddaras, vice president and head of EMEA, Nutanix. “Beware of generalisations: organisations are still in the process of moving certain workloads to certain types of cloud environment and this is far from being a full-scale migration. Cloud platforms provide a wealth of opportunities but, clearly, there are still wrinkles to iron out. The future of hybrid cloud will depend on making it easier to adopt solutions that allow workloads to pass seamlessly between multiple platforms.”
Clive Longbottom, service director of Quocirca, said: “We are still at the early stages of cloud, and organisations are finding that not all workloads are cloud-ready, and that their own staff are not quite as cloud-savvy as they hoped. But our research shows the thirst for cloud is there, and suggests that those moving towards a well-architected mixture of private and public cloud are the ones gaining the best overall competitive advantages.”
Among key findings of the report:
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Of respondents who said they had moved to cloud to enable faster delivery of new or incremental functionality to their businesses, just 39 per cent said this expectation had been fully met, while eight per cent said it had not been met at all.
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Only a small minority of respondents saw the ability to move capital expenditures to operating expenditures in the public cloud as a priority and just 17 per cent of those who did have had their expectations fully met.
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The most commonly cited changes that would make respondents embrace cloud platforms quicker all related to integration: API automation to integrate different platforms, followed by greater ease of moving workloads across platforms and intelligent automation of workload management.
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Data sovereignty and security is the #1 cited business reason why organisations are not adopting hybrid cloud more rapidly, ahead of overall cost. Security platform and security people worries were the two biggest technological issues stopping a faster move to hybrid cloud.
