Eran Gil, CEO, AllCloud in this article talks about how the cloud is doing exactly what it should –increasing productivity, lowering costs and enhancing innovation. We see these trends continuing with the aid of new complementary technologies in 2020 and beyond.
When we set out to create AllCloud’s 2020 Cloud Infrastructure Report, we were curious to see if the findings echoed what we were seeing with our own customers, or if the survey would unveil some surprises.
The results confirmed what we see on the ground every day – we are currently experiencing an aggressive shift to the cloud, with 85% of organizations expecting to have the majority of their workloads in the cloud by the end of 2020. Using key statistics from our inaugural report, I wanted to take a closer look at what this data means for today’s organizations.
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Security and Reliability become Drivers instead of Roadblocks
I’ve been in the cloud industry for a long time and can remember how in the early days of cloud adoption, circa 2008, the biggest hurdles to overcome were security and reliability (and the biggest driver was cost). Organizations were worried about data privacy on the cloud, how to protect business-critical applications and how to promise complete availability to their customers.
How times have changed. Now, we can see that 28% of respondents cited security as their main goal when moving to the cloud, as well as 26% who cited reliability. These factors are no longer holding organizations back, rather becoming one of the main drivers for modernization and transformation. Organizational fears have receded, and organizations are realizing that it’s the cloud providers who are best suited to provide the security that they need. Amazon, of which AWS is their cloud division, for example, completes millions of secure transactions every day on Amazon.com. They employ the top experts and incorporate the best practices to ensure security.
Cloud infrastructure is going to be more secure than any business can achieve on their environment, and when it comes to applications and data, businesses can benefit from cloud-native services or integration with best-of-breed third-party solutions.
Containers Are Becoming Mainstream, Further Facilitating IT Modernization
I’ve seen how Containers are facilitating an efficient and effective move to the cloud, as this technology enables mobility and portability of workloads with quicker than ever delivery capabilities.
As organizations continue to embrace and benefit from DevOps practices and pipelines, Containers are a perfect fit, especially when running on managed containers clusters like Kubernetes, enabling the exact speed and agility they are looking for as a replacement for older configuration management solutions.
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24% of Organizations Expect to be Cloud-Only in 2020
This data becomes even more incredible when you consider that the survey respondents are all companies with more than 300 employees, not small companies or start-ups. Digital transformation means exactly that. Organizations are disrupting the way they manage their infrastructure from the ground up.
Some insights from the trenches: increasingly organizations, especially tech companies, are recognizing that the ‘lift and shift’ approach of cloud migration isn’t cutting it for a long-term strategy. For businesses to really tap into the benefits of the cloud and gain agility despite their size, they need to build a cloud-native approach. ‘Lift and shift’ still exists of course, but as part of a phased approach to cloud migration; first move over the parts of the business that are simple to modernize, before building out a true cloud-native strategy overall. In order for this cloud enablement to work best, we consult with each customer to build a phased cloud migration roadmap. This allows the cloud to become a tool that works for them, rather than the other way around.
The Cloud Makes Managing Infrastructure Easier, Opening Doors for Innovation
The results of the survey show that organizations will continue to invest in new cloud infrastructure and services this year, including Database (21%), IoT, (17%), Containers and Serverless technology (15%). The service offerings for these categories, in particular, have made huge advances recently, making it much easier for customers to benefit from them, and begin to think about a roadmap for broader cloud strategies such as AI and Machine Learning.
I believe the cloud is doing exactly what it should – allowing organizations to focus on their core product or service, enabling the development of opportunities they need in order to successfully innovate, while simultaneously taking care of essential maintenance of infrastructure. From container technology to fully managed services, I see the cloud continuing to get more cost-effective, more reliable, more agile and even more widespread throughout 2020 and beyond.
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