International. Although nearly seven in ten organizations (68%) already use some form of cloud, only 31% have reached a certain level of maturity (with repeatable, optimized or managed cloud strategies) to maximize their value, and only 3 out of 100 have an optimized strategy to obtain the greatest business benefits.
This is clear from the global study Cloud Going Mainstream: All Are Trying, Some Are Benefiting; Few Are Maximing Value, conducted by International Data Corporation (IDC) and sponsored by Cisco, which also reveals the preponderance of hybrid cloud environments, the relationship between maturity and business results and the use of IoT applications and Cloud cybersecurity.
Cloud adoption is up 61% from last year (when IDC released the first edition of the Report), and while most organizations are still trying to improve their cloud strategies, there is still room for improvement.
Main keys of the Report
- Cloud adoption continues to grow, but few organizations have implemented mature/advanced strategies. IDC identifies five levels of cloud maturity: ad hoc, opportunistic, repeatable, managed, and optimized. 68% of the companies surveyed use some type of application in the cloud (increase of 61% compared to 2015), but only 31% have mature or advanced adoption strategies (repeatable, managed or optimized) compared to ad hoc and opportunistic strategies, while 22% lack strategy.
- Hybrid cloud is widely used, and spending on private cloud environments continues to increase. Although adoption is relatively evenly divided between public and private cloud (52% and 54%, respectively), 73% of organizations are committed to a hybrid strategy, including subscribing to multiple external cloud providers and using a combination of cloud resources and dedicated IT. Organizations also expect to increase spending on-premises private cloud by 40% over the next two years.
- Cloud adoption has considerable advantages. The higher the level of cloud maturity, the better the business outcomes, including higher revenue growth and a more strategic allocation of IT budgets, as well as tactical advantages including lower IT costs, shorter provisioning time for IT services, and a greater ability to meet Level Agreements. Service (SLAs).
- The cloud facilitates the adoption of IoT and cybersecurity. Three out of ten organizations (29%) that have adopted the cloud use Cloud-based IoT applications, a figure that increases to 62% for organizations with a more advanced strategy. Organizations with optimized strategies are also much more likely to use private or hybrid cloud for IoT. Cybersecurity is another of the most widespread uses, especially among organizations with a consolidated cloud strategy.
Drivers and barriers
The increase in the turnover of organizations with native Cloud strategies has been mainly due to the result of selling new products and services, reaching customers faster and the ability to access new markets.
Organizations with more mature cloud strategies are defined by the use of a culture of integration of development and operations or DevOps (80% of optimized organizations vs. 7% of ad hoc organizations), in addition to betting more on multi-vendor cloud environments based on location, policies and governance principles (84% vs. 40%, respectively), micro-service architectures for developing Cloud applications (79% vs. 9%, respectively) and containers or Docker (66% vs. 20%, respectively).
With regard to barriers to achieving greater maturity, the Report points to the lack of specialized personnel, the lack of a well-defined strategy and plan, outdated or unconnected organizational structures and the lack of alignment between the IT department and the Lines of Business (LoBs).
New professional Cloud Services
- Cisco has also announced a series of Professional Cloud Services designed to help businesses optimize their cloud environments as they move forward in their digital transformation, thus overcoming the shortage of specialized professionals. Services include:
- New multi-cloud management and orchestration services for Cisco Cloud Center, facilitating a unique design and modeling that can then be replicated anywhere.
- New cloud acceleration services that accelerate the design and deployment of both traditional private clouds and cloud-native solutions such as OpenStack and PaaS.
- Enhanced application migration services, which automate and eliminate the complexity resulting from integrating and moving applications and workloads to the Cloud.
- New IT transformation services for DevOps, focused on DevOps-based change management initiatives to align business processes and operational capability and facilitate the integration of both traditional and DevOps environments and teams.
