Companies are moving to the cloud in record numbers. Here, Clara Angotti, co-founder and president, Next Pathway, details the finding of its recent survey of over 1,000 IT leaders working in large, global organizations to uncover their attitudes and practices towards cloud migrations.
Our research reinforces that the motivation to move to the cloud goes beyond the need to gain operational efficiencies. In fact, the cloud is seen as a strategic imperative to remain competitive and an enabler for superior personalized experiences with customers. The pandemic has underscored this need and has helped fuel the demand to move workloads to the cloud.
As companies move to the cloud, they realize that these initiatives are as complex as they are critically important to their business. Hence, they are demanding more assistance at every stage of the migration, from planning through to cut over. Specifically, they are looking for help in the areas of migration planning (which workloads to migrate, which to retire and the order in which to migrate), workload translation, ETL repointing and enhanced data testing. As a result, they are requiring more services and tooling from cloud providers and partners.
Moreover, companies are hedging their bets, as they prefer a hybrid or multi-cloud cloud strategy and are performing proofs-of-concept (POCs) with new entrants, such as Snowflake and Databricks.
There is steady growth in the number and scope of cloud migrations since the beginning of this year. While there are many factors involved in this evolution, it can be largely distilled into one key word urgency. Migrating to the cloud is no longer an option; it is necessary to secure customers, facilitate innovative internal practices and external end-use applications and retain top talent. Companies that move to the cloud perceive themselves to be leaders in their industry.
Alongside the proliferation of cloud use is a greater awareness and need for cloud migrations to be executed faster, smarter, and be more secure. To drive cost and time efficiencies, organizations want to know exactly which workloads to move to the cloud and which ones to retire. Moreover, data and workload migration planning are extremely top of mind. IT leaders want robust visibility, transparency, and security embedded into the process behind their cloud migration right from the start.
When examining which cloud platform IT leaders preferred and why there are some clear winners as well as up and coming newcomers to the space that are being noticed for their high performance and integration capabilities. Enterprise IT leaders more than ever want flexibility in the cloud model they choose to adopt, whether it be a blend of public and private in a hybrid cloud model or a multi-cloud model.
We’ve identified four key insights from the survey data:
1. There Is a Shift in Enterprise Migrations From Thought to Action
The scope and speed by which enterprises are actively planning and executing the migrations of their legacy data warehouses, data lakes and ETL workloads to the cloud are increasing at a fast pace. The pandemic has played a large factor in pushing enterprises to action. Most respondents said that the pandemic has led to increased demands for companies to move workloads to the cloud. Even more striking is the clear notion that moving to the cloud is an initiative that IT leaders indicate will drive customer success via personalized solutions, as well as employee productivity, and positively boost the public reputation of their company.
2. Lack of Automated Tooling Is the Biggest Challenge Faced by IT Leaders
Just under half of IT, leaders surveyed agreed that a lack of automated tooling to expedite the translation and migration of data warehouse, data lake, and ETL code from on-prem to the cloud is a significant challenge for their migration effort. An added burden for IT leaders is that they’re unsure their internal teams can handle their data warehouse and ETL migrations to the cloud.
Learn More: Why The Path To The Cloud Lies Through Enterprise-Grade Connectivity
 3. Established Cloud Providers Continue To Offer the Most Superior Platforms
When probed which cloud provider IT leaders preferred, we asked two key questions: Which cloud provider delivers the most superior platform based on standard cloud metrics and the ability to perform AI/Analytics? And, which hyperscale cloud provider had the most robust cloud platform? Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, and Google were consistently ranked as the top cloud providers in the market based on these two considerations.
However, new entrants like Snowflake and Databricks are catching attention. One-third of IT leaders highlighted Snowflake’s multi-cluster shared data architecture as a key feature, which allows users and data workloads to access a single copy of data without impacting performance. With regards to Databricks, over half of IT leaders indicated that they value its improved cost, flexibility and performance due to the fact that its connections are not limited to Azure, Amazon S3, Postgres, HIVE, MySQL, and Java.
Learn More:Â Public Cloud Total Cost of Ownership: What You Should Know
4. Enterprise IT Leaders Are Not Satisfied With How They Are Managing Cloud Migrations
What came through loud and clear in our survey is that enterprise IT leaders are not satisfied with how they are managing their migrations to the cloud. This ranges from planning which workloads will be moved, the tooling they’re choosing to use, the techniques used to test code and data before it’s in the cloud, to which system integrators they should use and when to involve business users in the cloud migration process.
IT leaders understand the imperative and are eager to reap the benefits of migrating their data and workloads to the cloud. But they also understand that, given the complexity of the initiative, it requires careful planning and execution. Cloud providers have a long way to go to ensure their enterprise customers have the right methodology, technology, timelines and partners for an efficient and risk-free cloud migration experience.
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