“Just move it all to the cloud” is a message that many hyperscale providers have been pushing and promoting over the years. And many a corporate board has pushed the same to their CIO and respective IT leadership team. The promise and value proposition for cloud computing is seemingly simple and direct—move from a Capital Expenditures (CapEx) to an Operating Expenses (OPEX) model that scales with your IT operations. The message resonates. Do whatever is necessary. Take the leap: lift and shift, lift and optimize, rip and replace. Just don’t miss out.
The problem we now face is that for many organizations this migration to the cloud has plateaued, falling way short of expectations. Having the right expertise, making sure mission-critical workloads and applications run properly on the right cloud platform, not compromising on security or compliance, are all crucial to support a successful migration. Oh, and did I forget to mention that managing spiraling IT costs of application refactoring and associated time are the top concern for C-suite execs.
These barriers have slowed cloud migration progress to a glacial pace. So, what can be done to move things forward? We have some insights to share from a newly commissioned report from Frost & Sullivan entitled, “Breaking Through the Digital Transformation Plateau: The Urgent Need for a Better Cloud Strategy,” which outlines a bottom-up approach to building-out a cloud-enabled transformation.
The report establishes the essential role that cloud needs to occupy in any Digital Transformation (DX) initiative, while highlighting how any strategy should evolve as business requirements change. It covers the state of enterprise cloud adoption (trends, concerns, pitfalls, and solutions) but more importantly highlights how to align IT strategies to focus on operational excellence, recognizing that no single platform can address all situations. There is a clear benefit of stacking the existing transformations efforts and an enterprise cloud approach to achieve the promised benefits of a cloud operating model and greatly accelerate a transformation initiative.
Here are some interesting stats from the report:
- Digital Transformation (DX) depends on cloud usage, which accelerated in 2020.
- By 2022, 85% of businesses are expected to use cloud services, up from 42% in 2020.
- Use of multiple clouds within organizations jumped to 54% while hybrid increased by 14% in 2020.
- Organizations use on average three public cloud providers. This helps avoid lock-in but makes it difficult to have comprehensive organizational strategies, security, and visibility.
- 57% of businesses state lack of expertise halted or delayed cloud implementation; this number has actually been increasing since 2018.
- 64% of businesses struggle to keep up with new technologies from cloud providers, delaying respective DX progress.
- Continuously keeping up with cloud technology while ensuring business scalability and security is a daunting reality.
- 84% of businesses fall short of having the mature cloud strategy necessary for DX.
- Workloads will reach an inflection point within five years with new workloads created in the cloud surpassing those created on-prem for the first time ever.
- Over 85% of businesses state they have, or soon will use, public cloud IaaS and hosted private cloud services.
Finding the Right DX Partner
These findings really shed a light on the struggle to get cloud migration right. Add into this mix how COVID is compounding the situation as companies are turning to the cloud to manage remote employee access, create compelling customer interactions, quickly launch apps and new solutions, and control costs. Customers in turn expect increasingly sophisticated and tailored experiences, and employees need to securely and easily access data, apps, and systems from anywhere, on any device.
Clearly outside help is needed. Timing is critical and engaging an objective trusted partner is essential. All this makes finding the “right” partner even more vital. The benefits of working with a partner you can trust will include:
- Optimizing costs and making sure they align with usage.
- Applying security policies consistently across all data and applications.
- Accelerating, optimizing, and streamlining cloud migrations, resulting in lower down time, costs and risks.
- Helping fill the skills and knowledge gaps while reducing the need to add expensive specialized headcount.
- Giving your IT teams the time and resources to focus on higher value tasks such as innovation and business alignment.
We’ve been talking about digital transformations (DX) for decades now. We are at an interesting inflection point when it comes to cloud computing. The old cliché of throwing good money after bad applies here in many ways. Time to leverage what you have and reevaluate the “all-in”/one-cloud-fits-all mantra. We now have an opportunity to do migrations right and accelerate the benefits of cloud computing for all organizations.
If you’re like me, I encourage you to download and read the report from Frost &. Sullivan. It is a blueprint for moving cloud migrations forward. In the meantime, don’t hesitate to reach out to explore what your organization has on the whiteboard when it comes to cloud and digital transformation—what you’re struggling with, and what help is need. As I said in the opening paragraph – don’t miss out! The universe has dealt us an intriguing hand, and we have a once-in-a-career opportunity to play to win. Cloud Different™!
