Analysts report that less than 20% of enterprise applications have been moved from on-site data centers to the public cloud.
A recent Virtana survey of IT decision makers revealed that most enterprises (95%) say they have moved some applications to the cloud, but not without difficulty. Seventy-two percent (72%) of the enterprises surveyed had to move one or more of their migrated applications or workloads back on-premises.
Top reasons for this move back, as cited by respondents, were that:
- The applications should not have been moved to a public cloud in the first place (41%)
- Technical issues associated with public cloud provisioning (36%)
- Degradation of performance (29%)
- Unexpected cloud costs (20%)
The survey of 350 IT decision makers in the United States and United Kingdom was commissioned by Virtana and fielded by Arlington Research in November 2020. The high rate of repatriation, and the stated reasons for it, point to the complex challenges some organizations face during cloud migration. More specifically, complexities around which applications to migrate, lack of visibility into application dependencies, and understanding how workloads will behave in the public cloud once they are migrated.
“Virtana’s latest survey highlights an issue IT organizations are coming across a lot, regardless of where they are in their cloud journey,” stated Paul Bevan, Research Director of IT Infrastructure for Bloor Research. “In the drive to implement cloud-first, or cloud only strategies, many are stumbling over migrations and have had to repatriate applications back on-premises. Even cloud-native organizations are now having to focus on getting their multi-cloud strategy optimized. However we look at it, the cloud comes with its own challenges for everyone. Taking a ‘know before you go’ approach to the cloud is really a fundamental underpinning to a successful cloud implementation.”
The survey also found that despite the challenges, IT decision makers consider public cloud initiatives of strategic importance to their organizations and many are more committed to them than ever. Key findings include:
- More than two-thirds (68%) of respondents have already migrated 25% or more of their applications to public clouds (supporting analyst findings that 20% of apps have migrated)
- In addition, even in the current economic climate, 78% of companies are investing in public clouds at the same or an accelerated pace.
- Further, multi-cloud environments are the norm, with 81% of respondents reporting that they are using more than one public cloud provider.
“With a strong confidence in public clouds going forward, and so many organizations getting public clouds wrong the first time, it is clear that organizations need greater observability into application behaviors, interdependencies, and public cloud costs before they make a move to the cloud,” said Kash Shaikh, President and CEO of Virtana. “We are on a mission for enterprises to ‘Know Before They Go’ with a data-driven approach that yields actionable insights. Our decade of observability and monitoring on-premises to multi-cloud environments removes the complexity of migrating to the cloud and keeps it simple once applications and workloads are moved, resulting in 20% or more cloud cost savings.”
Randy Randhawa, Virtana’s SVP of Engineering, will be hosting a webinar with Bloor’s Bevan on March 4 at 9am PT. In addition to key findings from Virtana’s Hybrid Cloud Report, the webinar will dive into Bloor’s latest hybrid infrastructure research and the trends they’re seeing from IT leaders around the world when it comes to cloud migration and management.
