April 5, 2016
Cloud has been the buzzword in the IT industry for over half a decade, and through those years, we’ve seen a steady increase in its adoption. Whether hybrid, public, or private, the cloud has many attractive benefits for organizations of all sizes. That being said, it must be surprising to read a blog post from an IT consulting company about why you shouldn’t migrate to the cloud. The truth is that there are many environments out there who are not ready to make the move in any substantial way.
In a new international survey released by SolarWinds.com, only 43% of IT directors surveyed suspect that half or more of their IT environment will be cloud-based within the next 3-5 years. Furthermore, 60% say that it is unlikely that all of their organization’s infrastructure will ever migrate to the cloud. At the same time, the number of small businesses that have not utilized the cloud in any capacity dropped from 18% to a mere 6% in the past year.
With cloud adoption on the rise and a majority of IT directors skeptical that they will ever be fully in cloud, there’s only one alternative. Hybrid cloud is the future.
Why More Companies Are Not Migrating Totally to the Cloud
Looking deeper at some of the key findings from this survey, we see that the results serve to confirm many of the issues we are already hearing rather than unveil any new perspective:
- Top Three Barriers to Cloud Adoption: Preventing IT directors from moving forward with further cloud adoption are the same three culprits in any IT project: security, the need to support existing legacy systems, and budget limitations.
- In Any Deployment, Security is the Biggest Challenge: On-prem, in the cloud, or somewhere in between, security is still paramount for an organization. The SolarWinds survey found that 62% of hybrid environments list security as their largest concern and challenge.
The Hybrid Cloud Today: Migrate To The Cloud
The hybrid cloud occupies the gray area between a totally migrated and totally on-premise IT environment. Technically, if an organization utilizes merely one software as a service (SaaS) application, they are now in a hybrid cloud environment. Therefore, it’s better to look at the cloud as a spectrum with the extremes at either end listed as on-premise and full cloud. Most environments are going to fall somewhere in the middle of this spectrum.
SolarWinds had a few interesting findings regarding the state of hybrid cloud today.
- Top Three Benefits of Hybrid Cloud: Of those surveyed, they noted that the top three benefits of the hybrid cloud are infrastructure cost reduction, increased infrastructure agility, and relieving IT personal of some infrastructure management.
- Top Three IT Elements Migrated to the Cloud: From first to last, the top three IT elements migrated to the cloud are applications, databases, and storage. In addition, these same three areas have been marked as the top three for future migrations as well.
- IT Departments Are Not Ready for Hybrid Cloud Management: Only 27% of IT directors are certain their organizations have the necessary resources to manage a hybrid cloud environment—they cite five skills necessary to better manage them in the future.
- Hybrid IT Monitoring and Management Tools and Metrics (48%)
- Application Migration (41%)
- Distributed Architectures (32%)
- Service-oriented Architectures (31%)
- Automation/Vendor Management (30%)
Cloud-Ready Assessment Services
Looking at this data, uncertainty appears to be the overriding factor preventing cloud adopting. They are uncertain whether it will be secure, uncertain whether they can afford it, and uncertain whether they can support it. The one aspect everyone can agree on are the benefits.
In this climate, we can recommend two things. First, don’t worry about making large migrations all at once. An IT environment can still reduce infrastructure and free up personnel time by transitioning a few key elements. There may even be applications prepared to make the migration right now.
Second, bring in a consultant who can clear up uncertainty and assist in the future support of the hybrid system. Mindsight offers our Path to the Cloud Analysis to companies in this exact predicament. Through a Strategic Analysis of your environment, our senior consultants take a holistic look at the existing applications, network utilization as well as storage, hypervisor, and server performance. With all this information gathered, we can make recommendations for immediate moves and provide a roadmap for the future of your hybrid cloud environment.
Contact a Mindsight representative today, and let’s get started.
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About Mindsight
Mindsight, a Chicago IT services provider, is an extension of your team. Our culture is built on transparency and trust, and our team is made up of extraordinary people – the kinds of people you would hire. We have one of the largest expert-level engineering teams delivering the full spectrum of IT services and solutions, from cloud to infrastructure, collaboration to contact center. Our highly-certified engineers and process-oriented excellence have certainly been key to our success. But what really sets us apart is our straightforward and honest approach to every conversation, whether it is for an emerging business or global enterprise. Our customers rely on our thought leadership, responsiveness, and dedication to solving their toughest technology challenges.
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