Advice for Companies: How to Keep Your Cloud Moving Forward
These days most companies are onboard with cloud computing. However, what factors or trends do they need to weigh as they seek to improve their deployment in 2018?
Of course, it varies based upon the particular company, but there are some universal trends to look at, as well as some advice to provide. We’ll take a quick look at what’s happening now, as well as how to ensure that your enterprise’s cloud momentum does not stop.
Core to this issue is that the cloud is not always indicated in a technology solution. While it’s fine for most applications workloads, there are instances where it’s just not a technical and economic fit.
This applies to as much as 40 percent of enterprise workloads. The typical factors that disqualify a cloud solution are legacy systems and applications, or proprietary databases that are just too hard and too expensive to move.
Some of this waning cloud momentum is a byproduct of the inability to find workable platform analogs in the public and private clouds. This reinforces the notion that we will reach a saturation point, at some point.
Of course, technology is always changing. That lagging 40 percent could be finally migrated as cloud technology improves and becomes more inclusive to older platforms. Moreover, we’re just getting better at migration and refactoring, and thus the “learning curve” may not be an issue in a few years.
A new study by Kleiner Perkins showed a sharp increase in the number of buyers who are citing the possibility of lock-in as one of their top three concerns in moving to the cloud. 22 percent cited that possibility as an important concern in 2015 compared to just seven percent of buyers who thought this was a major concern in 2012 (see Figure).
Of course, lock-in is not the only concern. As you can see from the Figure below, both security and compliance are still on the radar of most enterprises moving to cloud. Also mentioned is uncertainty around costs.
Grumbling about lock-in has become more pronounced over the last few years as AWS consolidates its market share and continues to crank out compelling new features that require just enough customization work to embrace. This concerns enterprises that lived through this with Oracle, IBM, HP, and other larger enterprise technology players who promoted proprietary products that also proved uneconomical to remove.
Figure: More enterprises are concerned about vendor lock-in, according to a recent study by Kleiner Perkins.
This study pretty much reflects the current trend in the US to not push back on cloud, but to slow things down. The real pushback is around fear. Fear that the cost savings just won’t be there, or that the applications will fail, or, worse, that the applications will be hacked and the data exposed or removed, à la the Equifax breach (which was not cloud related, by the way).
