Local research and advisory firm, ADAPT, has today urged Australian organisations to rethink their cloud migration strategy as new survey results collected from over 1,000 Australian digital transformation leaders reveal evolving challenges and shifts in IT workloads brought on by cloud migration.

ADAPT’s Cloud Migration Study, an aggregation of results sourced from a bi-annual survey conducted since 2019 and involving a combined sample size of 1,043 Australian CIOs, CISOs, cloud, data centre and digital leaders, predicts the share of IT storage and processing performed by public cloud environments to increase to 47% by 2023, an increase of 10% over the current levels.

Matt Boon, Director of Strategic Research at ADAPT, said:

The onset of Covid-19 gave digital transformation leaders the impetus to move IT processing to cloud environments, but organisations acting on a new sense of urgency soon found themselves dealing with challenges they hadn’t expected.”

Survey respondents reported the following top challenges during cloud migration:

  • Dealing with legacy systems and applications (52% of respondents)
  • Architectural challenges (46%)
  • Compliance issues (43%)
  • Lack of internal cloud expertise (37%)
  • Data security (36%)
  • Higher than expected cost of migration (32%)
  • Higher than expected cost of ongoing operations (32%)

 

Cloud initially promised to make life easy for organisations by offering lower costs, better data visibility and more efficient workflows, but a lack of planning by organisations and interoperability between vendors has left many cloud customers feeling as though their migration has been an expensive misadventure.”

Pointing to the interest surrounding migration of workloads, the research shows 18% of organisations are now using more than five public cloud environments, however 9% are now moving workloads back from public cloud, suggesting a re-evaluation of cloud strategy.

Instead of organisations enjoying more efficient, data-driven ways of working, many have found themselves frustrated by complex multi-cloud environments, each with their own protocols and configurations needing even more investment and expertise to manage.

This has led to a rethink of design, and in some cases a walking-back of initiatives to the relative comfort of in-house colocation or private clouds.”

The findings also reveal public cloud workloads are being increasingly relied upon to support key operations, with productivity tools, customer apps, collaboration tools, mission-critical IT applications and data storage expected to consume 62% of cloud workloads by 2023.

Mr. Boon says migration of these workloads is too important to take lightly, and in order to make sure initiatives succeed, both vendors and organisations need to adjust their thinking.

A wider choice of highly competitive cloud providers is benefiting organisations in their procurement process, but the reduced visibility over data & workloads from multiple providers isn’t serving customers at all.

Cloud providers need to recognise the complexity customers face with multi-cloud environments and try to work cooperatively with other vendors to give organisations a better view of their assets.

On the other hand, organisations need to take a step back and re-examine the ‘how’ & ‘why’ behind their cloud migration plans. The most successful technology leaders understand the importance of an ‘outcome-first’ over a ‘cloud-first’ mindset, and assess the best option for their workloads before going ‘all-in’.

If the case for public cloud is strong enough, they take the time to properly audit their assets and develop frameworks which offer the right combination of portability and security.”

 

About the Cloud Migration Study

Beginning in 2019 and being conducted bi-annually across a number of Edge events, ADAPT has surveyed a combined sample size of 1,043 Australian CIOs, CISOs, CTOs cloud & DC leaders about their current cloud environments, future cloud plans and migration challenges.

For 10 years, ADAPT Ventures has connected and equipped Australian and New Zealand executives with the knowledge, relationships, inspiration and tools they need to become more commercially competitive for our collective good, and for that of future generations. For more information, visit www.adapt.com.au.

Media Contact media@adapt.com.au