Four-fifths of UK IT leaders do not believe they are ready to move from traditional hosting environments to IaaS providers. This is due to a shortage of in-house skills according to new research commissioned by Reconnix.
88% of IT leaders stated that moving applications to the cloud was a priority, with only one-in-twenty stating it was not a priority at all. This is despite the low rates of migration to IaaS.
Only 7% thought they had all the in-house skills to manage applications running in IaaS environments, while a combined 59% had only some of the required skills, no skills or did not know.
The research findings were reflected in IaaS buying and management behaviour, with only 26% planning to buy directly from the vendor. Nearly two-thirds admitted they would need some form of third party support.
Microsoft Azure was acknowledged as the most trusted IaaS provider, with 36% choosing it ahead of rivals IBM’s Smart Cloud, Amazon Web Services and Rackspace. Only 5% of IT buyers placed trust in Google’s Compute Engine ahead of the competition.
"The prominence of Azure and IBM in IT buyers minds is surprising, especially considering how far ahead AWS is, both technically and in terms of market share," explains Nice. "IT departments not used to buying cloud services can sometimes not be aware of the difference in levels of performance between IaaS providers and it can be tempting to choose a trusted name. This trust, however, could be based on a decades old relationship and not on the performance of current product offerings."
