Mixed approach to IT causing pain points, research finds

Claranet’s latest annual cloud adoption trends report has found that businesses are struggling to properly incorporate cloud services into their broader IT estates, with around half experiencing integration and migration problems. With end-users increasingly using a blend of hosting and deployment models for their IT, the research suggests that they will need to work more closely with their cloud service providers to maintain a functional and fully-integrated whole.

Claranet’s third annual cloud adoption report, launched today, has found that while the number of UK businesses using cloud services has increased to 74 per cent, however, just one in five (18 per cent) cloud users were fully satisfied by their chosen method for migration. This dissatisfaction could be explained by a lack of preparation in some areas, namely understanding of regulatory constraints (only 47 per cent felt well-prepared), understanding the impact of legacy technology (53 per cent felt well-prepared), and understanding how to integrate new cloud services with existing on-premises solutions (just 46 per cent).

According to Michel Robert, Claranet’s UK Managing Director, having an effective strategy in place to manage the evolution to cloud is vital.

Robert said: “We have seen that successful IT leaders are taking a flexible, iterative approach to technology that pays heed to business needs, and selecting the best tool for each job. This bottom-up evolutionary approach removes many of the risks of larger all-encompassing IT projects, which can sometimes be expensive, difficult to coordinate and less responsive to changing business requirements. But while the agility of cloud has lent itself well to a step-by-step approach to IT deployment, there are still challenges to address, to ensure successful migration and integration.

“CSPs must therefore take a more active and consultative role in helping businesses integrate their services and plot their migration strategies. Increasingly cloud providers need to act more like business consultants, working alongside IT decision-makers to understand the needs of different parts of the organisation. No two migration and integration plans will be the same, so it is important to develop strategic partnerships to achieve the most effective results,” he continued.

“Businesses predict that they will push even harder to move applications to the cloud over the next 18-months and this will test their cloud suppliers and their expertise in managing not only the day-to-day hosting challenges, but also in supporting how applications can be deployed, managed, and integrated into increasingly complex IT environments. IT decision-makers intent on a step-by-step strategy should therefore seek out providers that offer high standards in migration and integration, and have experience in managing and hosting a range of business applications effectively,” Robert concluded.