Cloud used in more than 90 per cent of firms - CompTIA
Cloud is now key in business IT, but the road to full adoption is not without obstacles
In the five years that CompTIA has been studying the cloud computing phenomenon, the researchers at the IT advocacy and education organisation have watched cloud go from potential game changer to foundational player in modern IT.
That meteoric rise, and the prospects for long-tail entrenchment of cloud in business technology, continued unabated this year, with more than 90 per cent of companies now using some form of cloud computing, the latest CompTIA study finds.
But not all of the news in the fifth Annual Trends in Cloud Computing report is so optimistic. It seems that as partners and their clients have steadily shucked initial trepidation over cloud adoption and moved from toe-in-the-water to deep end of the pool, they've encountered new sets of challenges.
And the further organisations get in their cloud adoption efforts, the thornier the obstacles become, the researchers found.
"This may come as a surprise to some firms, as they may hold an expectation that the initial migration and integration posed the largest obstacles to smooth cloud operations," said Seth Robinson, senior director of technology analysis at CompTIA.
About 28 per cent of companies that have progressed from cloud experimentation to non-critical-use stage say the transition required significant effort, while some 63 per cent of those organisations that underwent a complete cloud IT transformation rated the final transition as requiring significant effort.
"The bulk of the cost and effort for any IT project is typically consumed by integration and cloud computing is no different," Robinson explained. "If anything, cloud integration may be even more challenging as it requires Web APIs that may be unfamiliar to the technical team.
"Integration may be further complicated by lines of business procuring their own applications without being aware of how they will fit into the overall system."
Such challenges, while notable and important to solution providers busily making the transition to the cloud themselves while shepherding their clients along the same path, shouldn't distract IT decision makers from the wide range of benefits of cloud computing, led by the technology's ability to cut cost, Robinson said.
The poll of 400 IT and business professionals in the US and executives from 400 US IT firms also found that more companies are relying on cloud computing for everyday business processes like storage (59 per cent), BCDR (48 per cent) and security (44 per cent).
Other notable findings in the survey that show businesses are increasing their reliance on cloud services even as they reconsider their initial cloud forays include:
• 44 per cent of companies say they have moved either infrastructure or applications from one public cloud to another
• 25 per cent of companies have moved from a public cloud into a private cloud
• 24 per cent of companies have moved from a public cloud back to an on-premise system
These secondary migrations could be due to users searching for better features, tighter security, lower costs or a desire for open standards, Robinson said.
"The primary takeaway from all this movement is that no one model is the best answer for every workload," he added. "Companies will be utilising every type of system as they find the multi-cloud approach that works for them."