Originally published in Technology Decisions

Nearly half (47%) of Australian IT workloads are expected to be processed in the public cloud by 2023, according to ADAPT’s new Cloud Migration Study.

The research and advisory firm predicts that the share of IT storage and processing performed by public cloud environments will grow 10% in the next few years.

Based on a survey of more than 100 Australian CIOs, CISOs, and cloud, data centre and digital leaders, the report found that public cloud workloads are being increasingly relied upon to support key operations.

By 2023, productivity tools, customer apps, collaboration tools, mission-critical IT applications and data storage are expected to consume 62% of cloud workloads.

But the survey also found that IT leaders are re-evaluating their cloud strategies. While 18% of organisations are now using more than five public cloud environments, 9% are moving workloads back to on-premises environments.

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,”

– ADAPT Director of Strategic Research Matt Boon said.

The top challenges associated with cloud migrations reported by survey respondents include dealing with legacy systems and applications (52%), architectural challenges (46%) and compliance issues (43%).

“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,” Boon said.