How to Avoid the Downside of a Cloud-First Strategy

Cloud computing has evolved to the point where most enterprises have, to one degree or another, deployed cloud workloads. Our 2018 Cloud Survey found 70 percent of over 900 IT professionals use cloud services. But as enterprises see the benefits – namely business continuity, IT efficiency, elasticity and the pay-as-you-go billing model – business challenges remain.

According to the survey, only 29 percent of IT professionals said their organizations have a centralized strategy for moving applications to the cloud, while 42 percent reported migrations were typically conducted on an ad hoc basis. This piecemeal approach, which may benefit companies beginning to delve into cloud technology, often means organizations struggle to contain cloud costs, especially those using it beyond initial adoption or experimentation. In fact, 53 percent said cloud costs were higher than expected and 62 percent called out data and application migration costs as a particular challenge.

Is the high cost of cloud storage related to this ad hoc approach to application management?

In 2017, while some of our customers operating in the cloud had specific initiatives around ecommerce or healthcare, last year saw a big shift as large financial services, banking and insurance companies either created new workloads in the cloud or created internal policies mandating new workloads to be cloud deployment-ready.

Some organizations refer to this as “cloud-native” or “cloud-first,” that is, requiring new application design to take advantage of cloud elasticity. The growing volume and variety of data being migrated to in the cloud is pushing IT to reevaluate cloud management as they face lightspeed changes in areas like data science and governance.

It’s clear cloud adoption is increasing, but many organizations lack a formal strategy, and these “lift and shift” cloud migrations may be hurting them. Keep in mind that most applications weren’t architected to take advantage of cloud elasticity, they were created to run on a particular hardware, storage or capacity. As such, companies may be running at the maximum capacity of what they require, which becomes expensive for both storage and computing purposes. Leveraging cloud elasticity requires rearchitecting, and without a cloud-first strategy, enterprises run the risk of running up costs of migrating workloads.