Public cloud
As the use of public cloud services becomes more widespread, reliance on third-party services to manage those clouds is increasing.
84% of respondents are using public clouds today. Surprisingly, nearly half (49%) report using the Google Cloud Platform, 48% using Microsoft Azure and 42% Amazon Web Services.
Nearly half (49%) said they would increase use by 25% or more over the next two to three years. Another 25% said they would increase use by 50% in the same time period. None said they would decrease use.
The vast majority who said they are not using public cloud today said they plan to in the next two to three years. Among those customers, the top platforms cited for future use are Google (60%), Microsoft (42%) and AWS (27%).
Almost half (45%) report it took them three to six months to migrate workloads to the cloud. Only 22% said it took them less than three months. The rest (32%) took longer than six months.
Just over two-fifths (42%) say they continue to rely on third-party services. Another 29% say they do, but not as much as they probably should. Half of customers planning to migrate to the cloud also plan to rely primarily on third-party services. Another 42% said they would rely partially on those services.
Almost half (45%) say it’s more cost-effective to outsource tasks. Another 20% say the third-party service provider helps them right-size their IT environment. Interestingly, 19% did so because a cloud service provider encouraged it.
60% said getting end users to make the transition to the new platform was the biggest challenge, followed by 25% who said the internal IT team lacked the skills.
58% said the public cloud is both more secure and cost-effective. The next biggest issue, at 16%, was lack of skills to manage workloads running on-premise.
58% cited flexibility when it comes to adding and decreasing the amount of IT infrastructure being consumed. Another 54% said public cloud saves money while 51% said public cloud is more secure.
Regarding issues that prevented adoption of public cloud earlier, 51% cited data security concerns, 40% concerns over the stability of the cloud service provider and 33% the possibility costs might spiral out of control.
Regarding challenges that might preclude future use of the public cloud, 53% cited a major data breach, 45% a lack of internal resources to manage public clouds and 34% a decline in revenue generated by cloud service providers.