In November/December ITWeb ran a Multicloud-as-a-Service survey in conjunction with NTT / Dimension Data. The survey seeks to understand the current trends related to multicloud in the South African marketplace and whether businesses are ready to venture into multicloud in order to gain access to more functionalities.

A total of 98 valid responses were captured, with 64% of respondents being at executive and middle management level, and more than half of the survey’s respondents (48%) coming from businesses with more than 500 employees. A range of major industry sectors are represented, with 35% of respondents came from the IT sector, 13% from financial services and 7% from government.

Here are some of the key findings:

The three most important objectives for the organisation over the next 12 months were ranked as:
- Innovating with new products/services, technologies or business models (69%)
- Improving our business agility and our ability to respond to change (69%)
- Digital transformation of our organisation (63%)
The majority of respondents (70%) say they have a formal enterprise level strategy positioning the use of cloud-based services in their organisation. 30% don’t have such a strategy.
35% of respondents don’t have KPIs for cloud-based services. 21% say they do, but success of cloud services is evaluated by different roles; 16% say financial KPIs are used to measure implementations; 9% say financial KPIs are reviewed regularly and include security inputs; and 8% say financial KPIs are used to measure the strategic enterprise-wide migration.
Asked how their organisation has benefited from the use of cloud, the following were listed as the top 3:
- Improved speed of deployment of apps and services (54%)
- Improved overall business agility (48%)
- Reduced/more efficient total cost of IT operations (46%)
The majority of respondents (70%) say their organisation has considered a multicloud strategy.
The top 3 barriers to cloud/multicloud adoption in the organisation were:
- A lack of, or difficulty finding, necessary talented/skilled workers (34%)
- Challenges of getting multiple service providers/partners working together (31%)
- Complexity of managing cost across multiple cloud environments (27%)
A quarter (24%) of respondents operate a private cloud, managed by a service provider; 20% have a private cloud that they manage; 16% have a public cloud, managed by a service provider; 15% have a multicloud managed by a service provider; and 13% have a public cloud direct from vendor. 10% of respondents are on-premises only.
The technologies and frameworks used by respondents are:
- Applications are built utilising traditional technologies and frameworks 43%
- We’ve started to evaluate cloud native application design frameworks 38%
- Cloud native application/service designs are used more consistently across the enterprise 29%
- We have strict development processes in place and failure to follow process are reported 19%
- Cloud native frameworks and containers are the norm and are well documented 13%
Respondents say that their applications are organised as follows:
- We run a true hybrid environment that utilises both public and private clouds 26%
- There is no method or process to how applications are organised for development 16%
- Applications have been modernised into a cloud-aware architecture 16%
- Test instances of applications are deployed to on- and off- premises services 15%
- Prod. app. are running off-premises and designed for fault tolerance, self-healing 10%
Three quarters of respondents say that their CISO/cyber security team is closely involved with cloud and network decision making.
The vast majority of respondents (86%) believe their network is robust enough to power their cloud/multicloud journey.
The top 3 network priorities that respondents will be investing in are:
- Cloud-based network management 56%
- Network management, performance and analytics 55%
- Software-defined networks/infrastructure 52%