Survey data from Arlington Research says that nearly three-quarters (72%) of organizations required repatriation of applications for performance and/or cost, and for 41% of respondents, businesses migrated applications to the public cloud that should’ve stayed on-premises. Analysts in the CIO Dive article cite four main reasons:
- Cost savings projected by cloud providers goes unrealized
- Applications require modernization to benefit from cloud-native capabilities, which can be expensive and time consuming
- The internal IT team lacks readiness to support workloads in the cloud
- Applications in the cloud increase data ingress cost and latency issues
So in that context, let’s look at Gartner’s data on trends in public cloud. The analyst predicts public cloud will account for more than 45% of all enterprise IT spending by 2026. It’s 17% this year.
Four trends drive this — cloud ubiquity, regional cloud ecosystems, sustainability and cloud infrastructure and platform services automated infrastructure. Some of this is linked to the pandemic, but the analyst notes specifically that cloud ubiquity was true pre-pandemic. A key point – -the boundaries will disappear.
Thus, our last data of the day is MuleSoft’s 2021 IT and business barometer report. Quoting ZDNet, IT and business alignment has improved for the majority of organizations (87%) over the past 12 months — 43% say it has improved significantly. According to the report, “COVID-19 has sparked a new focus on business agility. More than three-quarters (78%) of organizations say improving business agility is extremely important to remain competitive in the future.”
That builds benefits – improved collaboration, operational efficiency, and better customer experience, and the challenges are integration issues, which about a third of organizations say have increased significantly, as well as security, governance, and a lack of business process skills
It might be tempting to read too much into the issues with cloud migrations highlighted by the research for those who might still be cloud skeptics. Resist. Those issues highlighted are the problems IT providers should focus on solving for customers, because Gartner’s prediction doesn’t say a move away from public clouds, and MuleSoft’s gives direction on where to go.
Internal teams often DO lack the readiness to manage the cloud. A lift-and-shift approach rarely works. And finally, integration – that huge challenge. And everything here is a list of opportunities. Offerings here are the clear needs.
Everything in here screams “business results”, too. Here are the buyers reasons to focus on in your solutions. Address these.