SolarWinds has revealed the findings of its new ‘IT Trends Report 2017: Portrait of a Hybrid IT Organisation’. The report explores the variety of ways in which IT departments around the world are integrating the cloud, and the effect hybrid IT has had on their organizations.
Overall, organizations in the UK are moving further into the cloud, with 92 percent of respondents reporting they have migrated critical applications and infrastructure over the past year. However, more than half (58 percent) said an IT skills gap was one of the five biggest challenges of the cloud and hybrid IT.
Key findings from the report show that today’s hybrid IT organizations are:
Moving applications, storage, and databases further into the cloud
- In the past 12 months, IT professionals have migrated applications (69 percent), storage (54 percent), and databases (37 percent) to the cloud more than any other areas of IT.
- By weighted rank, the top three reasons for prioritising these areas of their IT environments for migration were greatest potential for ROI/cost efficiency, availability, and elastic scalability, respectively.
Experiencing the cost efficiencies of the cloud
- Nearly all (92 percent) organizations have migrated critical applications and IT infrastructure to the cloud over the past year, yet over two-thirds (68 percent) spend less than 40 percent of their annual IT budgets on cloud technology.
- Nearly half (41 percent) of organizations spend 70 percent or more of their annual IT budgets on on-premises (traditional) applications and infrastructure.
- Nearly three in five (59 percent) organizations have received either most or all expected cloud benefits (i.e., cost efficiency, availability, and scalability).
- Cost efficiency is at times not enough to justify migration to the cloud: 22 percent migrated areas to the cloud that were ultimately brought back on-premises due mostly to security/compliance issues and poor performance.
Increasing in complexity and lacking visibility across the entire hybrid IT infrastructure
- Nearly three quarters (74 percent) said their organizations currently use up to three cloud provider environments, with the largest percentage using two to three; however, four percent uses 10 or more.
- By weighted rank, the number one challenge created by hybrid IT is lack of control/visibility into the performance of cloud-based infrastructure, followed by increased infrastructure complexity.
