With businesses looking for ways to remain competitive whilst managing costs and ensuring stability, integrating digital and legacy technologies remains a priority. Nearly four in 10 (38%) citied it as a key consideration. Businesses see how failing to establish integration will impact their ability to keep pace with change now and in the long-term. Over half (56%) of businesses cited their ability to integrate legacy technologies with cloud enabled applications as one of their biggest barriers to achieving transformation.
“A lot of organisations have now gained experience of using cloud applications or infrastructure. This means they are increasingly ready to accelerate the move to cloud across their business and even migrate to second generation cloud models. However, at the same time businesses have to deal with the legacy infrastructure that cannot easily be moved but still needs to be accessible and interoperate with infrastructure residing in the cloud,” explained Matthew Finnie, CTO at Interoute. “The best strategy for solving this is to connect your entire ICT estate on a common digital platform that also offers accelerated access to the major public cloud providers.”
With over a third (34%) of businesses looking to get out of infrastructure management entirely, organisations want to benefit from the off-the-shelf enhancements that cloud applications offer (41%) and push non-business critical applications, such as payroll and sales automation, to the cloud (38%). This is closely followed by the ability to move commodity and application services to the cloud (35%). Surprisingly, despite the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) quickly coming around the corner, just over a third (34%) saw this as a key consideration when making cloud infrastructure decisions.
When it comes to choosing which cloud to invest in, businesses are reviewing their choice against a number of factors. The majority (89%) see it as important to consider how close the cloud application is to the customer. While, nearly seven in 10 (68%) see the automated scaling of IT platforms as a priority when considering their IT infrastructure. This is closely followed by securing the architecture (53%), continual process evolution (52%) and facilitating a product factory (52%).
There are also signs that organisations are applying their past experience of the cloud to carefully determine the best strategy. The cloud is seen as offering the ability to manage peaks in demand, support continuous delivery and provide a secure connection to other regions and continents. Yet, given that the needs of each business are unique, over a fifth (22%) have the flexibility to decide the best infrastructure option for each application. A further one in five (21%) recognise that when the application requires a complete 'lift and shift' then it makes more sense to wait for that application to reach end of life before looking for a cloud option, highlighting that cloud strategies are maturing.