Businesses are still worried about the total cost of ownership and integration with other company systems when moving to the cloud, according to a report by Nutanix and Quocirca.
The Future for Hybrid Cloud report, commissioned by Nutanix and carried out by Quocirca, said these concerns are having a significant impact on the speed of cloud deployment in some organisations. In fact, because of these barriers to adoption, only 12% of businesses are willing to adopt a "cloud first" strategy and almost a third of businesses are actually downscaling their move to the cloud.
"While the message championed by many interested parties is that the world is moving to various clouds, our numbers paint a more complex picture," said Chris Kaddaras, vice president and head of EMEA, Nutanix. "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.
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"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."
Almost four out of 10 respondents said their business had met expectations when considering whether cloud enables faster delivery of functionality to their businesses and 8% said their expectations had not been met at all. Should providers release APIs that could automate the integration of different platforms or make it easier to move workloads between platforms, businesses would be more open to adopting the cloud.
"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," Clive Longbottom, service director of Quocirca, said. "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."
