EDITOR’S QUESTION
MECHELLE BUYS DU PLESSIS, MANAGING
DIRECTOR – UAE, DIMENSION DATA
gradually being augmented or replaced by cloud-only. This also
applies to private and hybrid cloud scenarios. This inevitable shift
to the cloud will also influence IT departments to accept the
need to continuously innovate and change and align with lines
of business.
Over the last few years, businesses and IT departments have
invested in multi-cloud environments, both public and private
as well as from different vendors. While there are associated
gains from such a cloud-first approach, this has created
management complexity and workload spill-overs. These are
increasingly becoming significant and demanding a longer-
term approach towards a hybrid cloud strategy with the full
portfolio of development tools and service level agreements.
Since the initial hype about public cloud, there has been
a realistic awakening among businesses about the true
value and cost of moving to the cloud. While the initial
expectation was about reducing the cost of IT operations, by
increasingly moving them to a cloud platform, this simplistic
expectation has proved elusive. The cost of managing
public cloud IT operations has become more expensive than
previous expectations.
A
ccording to Gartner, by 2020, a no-cloud policy
will be as rare as a no-internet policy is today.
Cloud-first, and even cloud-only, is replacing
the no-cloud stance that has dominated many large
vendors in recent years.
Cloud will increasingly be the default option for
software deployment. This does not mean that
everything will be cloud-based, and this concern will
remain valid in some cases. However, the extreme
position of having nothing cloud-based will largely
disappear. Hybrid will be the most common usage of
the cloud and will require public cloud to be part of the
overall strategy.
Gartner points out that by 2019, more than 30% of the
100 largest vendors’ new software investments will have
shifted from cloud-first to cloud-only. The well-established
stance of cloud-first in software design and planning is
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One reason is the skill sets for driving adoption of public cloud
platforms need to be built up in addition to maintaining skill
sets for managing traditional IT operations. So, while the
cost of legacy operations has remained constant the cost of
adding skills to manage public cloud operations have grown.
In the coming months, IT departments will review their
investments made in first generation public cloud and
evaluate their return on investments from operational
expenditures. Increasingly IT departments are assessing the
benefits of spending the same amounts on private clouds
and this approach is gaining traction in market segments
with high value transactional data. Service providers that can
help organisations build their private clouds while driving
business agility and managing their costs, will increasingly
become in-demand.
As usage of hybrid cloud solutions increases within a
business, IT departments will be increasingly pressured to
ensure standardisation of services for internal and external
customers. This will drive IT departments to invest in hybrid
cloud solutions and service providers that facilitate creation
and management of standardised services over other solution
and service providers. n
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