News

Survey: Not All Orgs Are All-In on Public Cloud

• By David Ramel
• 05/28/2020

Contrary to expectations, most organizations surveyed in a recent report are moving certain workloads off of the public cloud and back on-premises.

Research firm IDG recently published the results of its "The State of IT Modernization 2020" online survey, which was conducted late last year. One highlight of the report is that changes to cloud strategies last year most often included completing initial cloud-native initiatives (50 percent) and adopting a multicloud approach using more than one public cloud provider (49 percent).

Along with that, 84 percent of respondents reported having moved select workloads from a public cloud to alternative cloud or non-cloud location, such as on-premises datacenters.

The workloads most often moved off public clouds include database, Web site/Web apps, dev/test, and BI/data warehouse/data analytics.

IDG said this reflects challenges involved with "determining optimal workload placement in today's multicloud and hybrid cloud landscapes." Indeed, the hybrid cloud movement again shows strong in this report, according to IDG:

64 percent of organizations that have completed their initial IT modernization initiatives have switched from an all-private or all-public cloud strategy to a hybrid cloud approach, again highlighting the trial-and-error that many companies undergo to find the optimal cloud path for their needs.

Other highlights of the report include:

• The top 3 IT modernization challenges in 2020 are projected to be establishing governance strategies and processes, defining and optimizing IT operating models, and integrating centers of data.
• Public cloud cost overruns are common, with 69 percent taking steps to reduce these overages.
• Application modernization is inhibited by a lack of automation capabilities.
• Top obstacles to IT modernization in 2019 included competing priorities (44 percent), outdated processes and tools (43 percent), outdated infrastructure (40 percent), and skills gaps (38 percent).
• More than 8 in 10 organizations (84 percent) have outsourced or started outsourcing cloud management to a managed services provider. Use of managed services is high across all IT modernization maturity levels.
• Adoption of managed services is important at every stage of the IT modernization journey, with an average of 95 percent of respondents stating they outsourced one or more IT functions to a managed services provider.