Are we ahead of ourselves in a cloud-drenched fever? Moving to the cloud doesn’t mean that technology management headaches are also being handed over to a third-party vendor – if so, the rush to the cloud may be outpacing the ability of other companies to keep up. organization.
Photo: Joe McKendrick
Thanks to the Covid crisis, 2020 has been an explosive year of cloud adoption and it turns out that everything is pushed even deeper into the cloud in 2021. There is no end to the cloud boom and along with new challenges for technology teams.
That’s the gist of a survey of 300 IT executives from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, underwritten by Splunk, show that at this point, most organizations still have most of their technology systems in place. But get ready to start saying goodbye to on-premises IT. Things are going to change dramatically, and within the next two years most businesses will be running primarily on the cloud.
Over the past year, 67% say their organizations have accelerated the adoption or deployment of planned cloud applications, services or infrastructure – up from 56% who said their organization they did this due to the Covid-19 pandemic in last year’s survey.
The survey shows that the cloud will continue to accelerate. A majority (65%) predict that more than 60% of their IT portfolio will be in the cloud within two years. This represents a jump of 30 percentage points from today. A total of 85% say that at least 40% will be in the cloud by 2023, a similar 32 percentage points higher than those reporting that the most are in the cloud today.
“However, the rapid acceleration and expansion of the cloud has brought its own challenges – not only in terms of integration and management, but also in relation to new cybersecurity, data privacy, measurement ROI measurement and cloud talent concerns,” the study’s authors pointed out. “With most respondents leveraging the cloud in addition to their on-premises systems – and anticipating maintaining such a hybrid cloud infrastructure for the foreseeable future – management difficulties these complex environments effectively is evident.”
For starters, 62% of IT executives say they’re having a hard time keeping up with the rapidly evolving technology roles and responsibilities needed to manage today’s cloud adoption. its increasing. Managing data across mixed environments also creates new challenges. “As you add more cloud providers and more applications, your complexity changes a lot,” Jay Bhat, information security officer at Franciscan Alliance, is quoted as saying in the study. “Every time you add a new environment, it increases the complexity of how you share and protect data, and ensures only the right data goes from one environment to another.”
Corporate education is an important part of an effective strategy. The Harvard Business Review report describes how Chegg, an educational technology and information publisher, has realigned its cloud approach over the past year to create smaller, more flexible cloud accounts. more active for their engineering teams to use. John Heasman, chief information security officer, is quoted in the study: “We’ve been in the cloud for so long, we’ve learned a lot of what works and what doesn’t. “We ended up in a position where we needed to take a step back and review our architecture to align with best practices in cloud infrastructure and improve the overall our process.”
Heasman and his team are focused on educating company leaders on how their cloud strategy will create new services. “This isn’t just a case of saying, ‘This is a new account,'” Heasman said. It’s yours.” “A lot of planning is required to ensure the right level of monitoring while allowing our team to get the full benefit of the cloud-native technology.”
Notably, the hybrid cloud/on-premises environment will be the dominant mode for some going forward. 85% of respondents say their organization has a hybrid cloud environment today – and 88% of respondents predict that their organization will maintain a hybrid cloud approach in the future near the.
During the unprecedented 2020-21 cloud push, the talent shortage to manage hybrid environments has become the number one prominent issue. Here are the top problems that have arisen:
- Lack of talent needed to manage the cloud 45%
- Increased cybersecurity/data privacy concerns 44%
- Difficult to integrate data/cloud services 34%
- Lack of end-to-end visibility across technology environments (in the cloud and on-premises) 31%
- 24% increase in cost
- Making hasty choices leads to more job creation later on (e.g. technical debt) 23%
Again, many of these problems will be handled by IT teams – and cannot be effectively outsourced to cloud providers. The survey found that only 21% of IT executives strongly agree that their cloud providers provide all the necessary tools and processes to manage and optimize a cloud environment. their own, while 42% agreed. “Cloud providers will always appreciate the value of cloud technology,” says Bhat – especially when speaking to non-tech business leaders. “Technology is only part of the puzzle,” he said. “To get value out of it, you have to put the right people and processes in place and participate in the implementation of new functionality, testing it, and changing your business processes. Without that. , you will lose all value of the cloud migration.”
