Disruptive report reveals mass cloud adoption more hype than reality

A report from Nutanix has suggested the idea of cloud usage being omnipresent among businesses may not be as true as people think.

'The Future for Hybrid Cloud' was conducted by Quocirca on behalf of Nutanix and surveyed 400 IT directors and strategists across the UK, Germany, France, and the Netherlands.

The report asserts there remains work to be done to win over doubters on several fronts as it discovered that while most organisations are now using some form of cloud computing, significant concerns still remain around key factors like integration, total cost of ownership and security.

"We are still at the early stages of cloud, and organisations are finding that not all workloads are cloud-ready, and that their own staff are not quite as cloud-savvy as they hoped," says Clive Longbottom, service director of Quocirca.

"But our research shows the thirst for cloud is there, and suggests that those moving towards a well-architected mixture of private and public cloud are the ones gaining the best overall competitive advantages.

And hybrid cloud? The report asserts it is not being deployed as quickly as many proponents suggest, largely due to persistent obstacles.

Despite many CIOs declaring their organisations consider cloud as the default option when deploying new services, just 12 percent of respondents say they have actually adopted a 'cloud first' posture.

Furthermore, while most current cloud users are increasing their dependency on cloud, a significant minority are actually shrinking their cloud deployments (two percent for public cloud, 10 percent for private cloud, seven percent for mixed cloud and 11 percent for hybrid cloud).

Vice president and head of EMEA at Nutanix, Chris Kaddaras says while the message championed by many interested parties is that the world is moving to various clouds, their numbers paint a more complex picture.

"Beware of generalisations: organisations are still in the process of moving certain workloads to certain types of cloud environment and this is far from being a full-scale migration," says Kaddaras.

"Cloud platforms provide a wealth of opportunities but, clearly, there are still wrinkles to iron out. The future of hybrid cloud will depend on making it easier to adopt solutions that allow workloads to pass seamlessly between multiple platforms.

Key findings of the report included:

• Of those who have moved to cloud to enable faster delivery of new or incremental functionality to their businesses, only 39 percent said this expectation had been fully met
• The most commonly cited changes that would make respondents embrace cloud platforms quicker all related to integration: API automation to integrate different platforms, followed by greater ease of moving workloads across platforms and intelligent automation of workload management
• Data sovereignty and security is the most cited business reason why organisations are not adopting hybrid cloud more rapidly, ahead of overall cost