ITWeb, in partnership with CommerceQuest SA, conducted a survey during June 2023 to examine the lessons learned by SA businesses during their cloud migration journey.
The objective of the survey was to find out from those companies that have moved or are in the process of moving to the cloud, if the journey was plain sailing or more of a perfect storm.
A total of 133 valid responses were captured, with 64% of respondents being at executive or middle management level.
Eric Sommer, MD, CommerceQuest SA, says, “In terms of the overall findings, we’re surprised to see that more companies than we anticipated are on their cloud journey and further along the journey than we anticipated. Generally, the industry, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) report that only 10% of companies are using the cloud, whereas this survey suggests it is a much higher number.”
A third (31%) of the survey respondents describe their stage of cloud adoption as ‘initial implementation of production applications’. A quarter (24%) say ‘broad implementation of production applications’, 17% say ‘discovery and implementation of cloud’; and another 17% say ‘using cloud for test and development environments’; while 8% say ‘running trials and pilot projects’.
...more companies than we anticipated are on their cloud journey...
Asked to pick a statement that best described their cloud adoption (and allowed to select more than one answer), 43% of respondents say they adopted a hybrid or multicloud solution; 23% say they have it set up internally and have cloud functionality within their on-premises datacentre; 23% have their workloads hosted in a colocation centre; 22% exist as a tenant in a multi-tenant environment’; and 19% say they are currently considering setting up a private cloud. 14% have a legacy datacentre with no cloud functionality.
Sommer says it is interesting, when looking at the top three technology drivers when moving to cloud, that over half of the respondents (59%) said moving disaster recovery to the cloud is the top driver in the migration to cloud, closely followed by 56% stating remote working and collaboration and also close behind at 53%, respondents said improving business continuity was their key driver.
The most important operational challenges that respondents face or foresee from their cloud migration strategy in the next 12-18 months are:
- Ensuring adequate IT talent and skills availability (46%)
- Ensuring consistent security, access control and compliance (41%)
- Optimising spending on cloud (38%)
- Ensuring specific workloads run on the best cloud option (38%)
- Ensuring application performance and availability (38%).
“It’s not unexpected that the primary operational challenge in migrating to cloud is ensuring adequate IT talent and skills availability. At 46%, this is a high percentage, but is not unexpected owing to the economic downturn, the pressure on the Government to supply power to the nation, plus other factors, that are causing skills, specifically IT skills, to leave South Africa and work elsewhere.”
...the primary operational challenge in migrating to cloud is ensuring adequate IT talent and skills availability.
Sommer says, “It’s extremely satisfying to see that half of respondents (49%) have moved applications to the cloud over the past year, and that almost half (44%) will move more applications when they can see an improvement in the options available."
The pricing model has caused a third of respondents (32%) to slow down on their cloud adoption plan, and relatively few (19%) are concerned about cloud security, which is interesting because five years ago, the security of applications in the cloud was one of the top concerns.
Finally, more than half of the survey’s respondents (59%) say they used a forum/ community/discussion group to learn and ask questions about cloud adoption. While 14% of those say they didn’t find it helpful, 20% say they would use a forum/community/discussion group if they could find one that discusses cloud in SA.
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