Nearly two-thirds of organisations that currently use cloud also use some level of managed services, a new report has revealed.
The report entitled 451 Research, Demystifying Cloud Transformation: Where Enterprises Should Start was commissioned by the cloudy Virtustream
The report said that 71 per cent of large enterprise respondents revealing that managed services would be a better use of their money in the future, and a substantial majority is saying it allows their teams to focus on more strategic and productive IT projects.
The Virtustream-commissioned report examined the significance of managed services for cloud, driven by the increasing complexity of enterprise IT. The report’s findings highlight key areas of managed cloud services that should expect to see growth in the next 12 months, including managed security, migration and integration, cost and performance optimisation, and monitoring.
Melanie Posey, Research Vice President & General Manager, Voice of the Enterprise, 451 Research said: ” While enterprise companies are astutely aware of the breadth of cloud options available to them today, they are looking to cloud-managed services partners to bridge their in-house skills and resources gaps, and for access to their deep expertise across cloud assessment, planning, migration and domain experience.”
Joy Corso, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Virtustream, said, “Organisations face a constant challenge to maximise and modernise their IT investments to future-proof their businesses. These new findings from 451 Research underscore the broad benefits enterprises can realise in partnering with a cloud company like Virtustream to orchestrate the cloud migration and management of their mission-critical applications and complex IT environments.”
The report notes that 57 per cent of businesses is moving toward a hybrid IT environment, leveraging both on-premises systems and off-premises cloud/hosted resources in an integrated fashion. For public cloud, 72 per cent indicate they are using more than one vendor, with 8% indicating they have more than three public cloud vendors today.
As hybrid/multi-cloud becomes the default enterprise IT architecture, achieving optimised workload migration, integration and operations will typically require new skills sets. As such, the research findings indicated that enterprises of all sizes would look to use managed and professional services to fill gaps in their technical expertise and IT personnel.
The report also shows that backup is the first step into managed services, with 41 per cent penetration among organisations using public cloud, noting that mature public cloud users (and digital transformation leaders) are more likely to already have managed services in place, particularly for operational monitoring and management of applications deployed in cloud. Public cloud platform expertise remains an acute IT skills gap; the difficulty of attracting/retaining IT personnel in this space is also driving organisations toward managed services providers (MSPs) and professional services firms.
The report finds that most of the current roadblocks aren’t technical but somewhat operational; mostly mundane but requirements, like meeting regulatory and security guidelines that are etched in process and paperwork. Cloud migrations introduce new challenges, including different approaches to capacity planning, and new, more diverse cost/consumption scenarios.
Most enterprises cited security as the primary challenge to cloud transformation and adoption, with 60 per cent of respondents saying that data protection and security were the most essential workload-related IT challenges to address, followed by governance and compliance management as the next biggest challenge at 37 per cent. Again, this can be boiled down to a lack of skills and human resources in-house, a need to transform the business process as much if not more than IT operations. Managed services providers can help organisations fill these gaps by blending public clouds and hosted private cloud platforms with existing IT operations.
