The pace of cloud use is increasing, according to Rackspace Technology’s global survey.
The survey, with the catchy title, Future of Compute, highlights the increasingly rapid pace of cloud adoption. According to the survey, the question is no longer whether organizations should migrate to the cloud, but how they can leverage the cloud for innovation, efficiency, and growth.
More than half of survey respondents said that all their applicable infrastructure now resides in the cloud, while the rest said they plan to move more of their workloads into the cloud as possible.
More than two thirds of respondents’ compute workloads are now supported by public cloud, colocation, and managed to host services. At the same time, IT infrastructure spread has reached an equilibrium and leaders expect it to hold steady over the next three to five years.
Underscoring the central role that technology is playing in transforming operations, more than a third of respondents said executives play a key role in driving the direction of the company, as silos between functional areas continue to dissolve.
Rackspace Technology Chief Technology Evangelist Jeff DeVerter said that IT leaders had the power to help companies and organisations see around corners to solve both their short-term and long-term business challenges and provide critical guidance in the areas of business growth, security, efficiency, and customer experience.”
Most respondents say they are already enjoying the benefits of a public cloud (63 percent) and/or a private cloud (66 percent). In addition, public cloud investments represent as much as 40 percent of most IT budgets, with private clouds at 30 percent.
Containerised applications are also continuing to grow in popularity as organisations shift away from on-site data centres. The most common tactic among organisations (85 percent) employing the public cloud remains “lifting and shifting” using cloud-based VMs (virtual machines), but 84 percent of respondents say they are investing in the public cloud with containers. 62 percent of respondents say their use of containerised applications will increase in the next two years.
The cloud revolution brought an influx of advancements to the world of computing; however, the past decade of inundation is settling into a more level pool of opportunity.
Over the next 12 months, respondents anticipate their infrastructure spending will include on-site data centres (55 percent), managed hosting (52 percent), public cloud (51 percent), and colocation (34 percent). However, 60 percent of respondents also said they envision not owning a data centre in the next five years.
Security, data privacy and control understandably remain as top concerns among IT leaders, particularly for public cloud use cases. While these concerns present valid obstacles to getting more companies fully reaping the benefits of the cloud, the reality is that heterogenous multi-cloud infrastructure is proving to be the norm. Companies that focus their resources on successfully addressing security and data privacy concerns while innovating with the cloud can expect to achieve a significant competitive advantage.
