News

Study Highlights IT Concerns When Planning Cloud Migrations

• By Kurt Mackie
• 04/22/2022

IT leaders at large organizations want tools and automation support for their cloud migrations, according to a 2022 study published this week by Next Pathway.

"The State of Enterprise Cloud Migrations" study indicated that 49 percent of respondents wanted cloud service providers to provide help with application migrations. They also wanted cloud service providers to offer "multicloud strategies and consulting services" (45.2 percent) and a "more robust partner ecosystem" (41.9 percent).

Toronto-based Next Pathway "surveyed over 1,200 IT leaders working in large global organizations" to compile the study. Further methodological details weren't described.

Next Pathway bills itself as an "automated cloud migration company," offering scanner, translation and validation products for cloud migrations.

Cloud Migration Stumbling Blocks and Concerns
Top strategic stumbling blocks for large organizations contemplating cloud migrations included the "security implications" of multicloud implementations (45 percent), multiple cloud management staffing and other costs (37.4 percent) and a "lack of internal skill set" for multicloud management (32.5 percent).

Top IT concerns in shifting toward cloud services included:

• Determining which workloads to move to the cloud (48 percent)
• Lack of automated tools to move code to the cloud (47.5 percent)
• Lack of automated tooling for ETL migrations (44.2 percent)
• Lack of internal experience for cloud moves (43.1 percent)

Hybrid Cloud
A little more than half (55.3 percent) of the respondents described the main benefits of a "hybrid" cloud approach as being "the security and privacy benefits of the private cloud." The hybrid cloud term refers to using premises-based infrastructure plus cloud services.

However, only about 30 percent of the respondents indicated that they had a production-level hybrid cloud implementation in place. Others said that they were evaluating a hybrid cloud implementation (26.9 percent) or were in the process of implementing it (24.5 percent).

Cloud Migration Surprises and Tips
The respondents who said that they had completed cloud migrations indicated that they were mostly surprised by having to spend more time on the actual implementation process (42.5 percent). Also, 41.6 percent said that "the planning took longer than expected."

Organizations should do the following things when moving to the cloud, according to the respondents:

• Identify interdependencies between applications and their interactions with other systems (20.6 percent)
• Create a backup strategy (18.9 percent)
• Determine the volume of data to be moved in advance (18.3 percent)
• Create a disaster recovery strategy (15.8 percent)
• Partner with a proven cloud migration expert (13.7 percent)
• Address cloud vendor risks (12.6 percent)

Favored Clouds
The respondents were asked which cloud services provider had "the most robust cloud platform."

Opinion was somewhat equally split on the robust cloud question. Microsoft Azure was favored by 37.3 percent of respondents, although 32.1 percent liked Amazon AWS and 29.7 percent preferred the Google Cloud Platform.

Next Pathway polled "large" enterprises for the study. Organizational size wasn't defined, though.