Cloud adoption across several industries 'remains low', study claims

Report from Aptum found that on-premise still remains the preferred option across several key applications

A new report released by MSP Aptum claims that cloud adoption practises among IT professionals across several industries are low, despite only 39 per cent of respondents claiming they are "completely satisfied" with their rate of cloud transformation.

The Modernisation Minefield is the final part of Aptum's Cloud Impact Study, which surveyed 400 senior IT professionals in the US, Canada, and UK across industries in financial services, IT, technology, telecommunications, manufacturing, retail, public and commercial sectors.

It found that only 20 per cent of respondents are utilising DevOps across all applications, and just 17 per cent use container services to develop and deploy all apps.

Marvin Sharp, VP product and strategy, Aptum, said: "Moving applications from on-premises to the cloud is not a simple case of virtualising workloads in data centre servers as opposed to on-site servers.

"To see efficient, agile, and profitable results, refactoring applications where appropriate is essential. If you don't modernise applications to make them cloud native, costs can be far more unpredictable.

"Respondents want to accelerate their cloud deployments, but on-premises still serves a purpose for some and will continue to for the near future. Organisations may already have sunk costs and want to make the most of their current investment, or it's simply not a priority to migrate non-critical applications like CRM to SaaS."

For seven out of the nine application categories surveyed - Human Resources (HR), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), backup, disaster recovery, bespoke applications, development, and operations - it was discovered that on-premises remains the preferred hosting option.

The second part of Aptum's Cloud Impact Study, The Security and Compliance Barricade, found that refactoring legacy applications for cloud infrastructure is a top barrier to cloud transformation, second only to security and compliance.

But nearly 60 per cent of respondents to the latest study agreed that cloud adoption has improved their organisation's agility, though believe they could still be more agile.