'Cloud adoption will peak within the next five years' - Cloudreach exec

MSP's head of cloud strategy opens up on how cloud deployment has changed in wake of pandemic and why organisations need to see the tangible benefits of cloud before going all in on it

The full impact of the pandemic on cloud adoption by enterprises has yet to be felt, according to Cloudreach's head of cloud strategy and professional services.

Dave Chapman told CRN that COVID-19 restrictions have instigated a lot of online collaboration technology but that the peak of cloud migration is yet to be witnessed, though he anticipates it happening within the next five years.

"Industry watchers generally say that about 30 per cent of the world's workloads were on the cloud pre-pandemic," he explained.

"COVID drove a lot of collaboration technology online but it hasn't yet really driven a huge amount of additional cloud migration - but it will do.

"We're now moving into the period where cloud adoption and cloud implementations will probably peak in the next five years - we'll probably get to about 80 per cent of the world's workloads on the cloud - and rising up underneath that will be the true business experimentation and digital transformations that get talked about a lot but there's not much of it going on at enterprise scale."

Cloud adoption will likely take the form of hybrid and multi-cloud models because they allow the user to de-risk their migration or enables easy regulation, he continued.

"Hybrid cloud offers a way to stage migration to the cloud and de-risk that migration to the cloud; it can also offer some application architectures that can benefit from having local physical equipment," he said.

"Most enterprises of any level of scale are going to be multi-cloud, if for nothing else then for regulation, so they don't have all their eggs in one basket.

"You get certain features on one cloud that are better than certain features on the other - no one cloud does everything better than everybody else. Choosing the right workloads and putting them on the right cloud can optimise the amount of transformation that a business can do."

The pandemic did not throw up any challenges to cloud deployment that were not already there, Chapman said, adding that it might have heightened some organisations' risk appetite, in that they adopted cloud or other technologies that they may have been wary of pre-pandemic.

"If the cloud didn't exist, organisations would very much struggle to support this new way of distributed working," he stated.

"Whether they like it or not, organisations have got an opportunity to sense what it's like working like this so it becomes easier for them to conceptualise, accept and understand it and they then begin to see that there might be some advantages to distributed working. For example, travel or real estate costs could go down.

"COVID accelerated acceptance of a lot of things that were traditionally difficult for businesses to accept, but it didn't fundamentally change what needed to get done it just helped accelerate it."