Almost all (95 percent) of IT professionals perceive cloud or hybrid IT as one of the top five most important technologies in their organisational IT strategy today, new research shows. The figure is a stark increase on previous surveys, which revealed that a third of organisations hardly ranked cloud, or said it was not on the radar at all.
Despite the number of respondents ranking cloud computing technology so highly, almost half (41 percent) said their current environments were not optimised for peak performance and spending too much time reactively maintaining environments.
Barrier Busting
The biggest barriers to businesses optimisation were cited as infrastructure (42 percent) and inadequate organisational strategy (43 percent).
From the survey, almost half (49 percent) of respondents admitted that to overcome cloud computing challenges, they are investing heavily into containers; placing them as the top investment priority over the likes of AI and machine learning. In comparison to the same report last year, this saw just 15 percent of IT professionals wanting to develop containerisation skills.
Trends in technology are ever changing, but SolarWinds’ report along with findings from Gartner revealed that cloud computing is only expected to continue to grow and remain a top priority for the next three to five years. Gartner’s findings backed up SolarWind’s findings, predicting the cloud services market is expected to grow by almost a quarter this year to $186.4 billion.
Clouds Remains High
Gartner cited that the growth in cloud services is down to the accelerated growth of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), forecasted to grow by 35.9 percent in 2018.
“The increasing dominance of the hyper scale IaaS providers creates both enormous opportunities and challenges for end users and other market participants,” said Sid Nag, research director at Gartner.
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“While it enables efficiencies and cost benefits, organisations need to be cautious about IaaS providers potentially gaining unchecked influence over customers and the market. In response to multi-cloud adoption trends, organisations will increasingly demand a simpler way to move workloads, applications and data across cloud providers’ IaaS offerings without penalties.”
Software as a Service (SaaS) remains the largest segment of the cloud market, expected to be valued at $83.6 billion by the end of 2018.
“In many areas, SaaS has become the preferred delivery model. Now SaaS users are increasingly demanding more purpose-built offerings engineered to deliver specific business outcomes,” said Nag.
Further expectations from Gartner include the top 10 providers to account for almost 70 percent of the IaaS market by 2021, up from 50 percent in 2016.
All in a Day’s Work
Both findings demonstrate the priority for most businesses is to ensure day-to-day activities are carried out effectively, prior to focusing on the more in-depth developments and emerging technologies such as AI and blockchain.
“The promising projections made within the Gartner report shouldn’t really come as a surprise. Cloud plays a key role in digital transformation initiatives and is driving organisations to operate in a multicloud world, working across multiple environments and cloud providers,” Kostas Roungeris, Marketing Manager, Cloud SME EMEAR at Cisco, told CBR. “Public cloud services therefore should be expected to be growing at such a rate, as they are a vital part of future-proofing businesses, unlocking whole new sets of capabilities.”
