Jan/Feb 19 - ChannelVision Magazine

Learning from Late Cloud Adopters LETTER The folks at 451 Research recently surveyed a group of laggardly adopters of public cloud infrastructure, and the takeaways provide some interesting fodder for cloud enablers looking to convert this cohort. Much the same can be said for providers of other public-cloud- delivered solutions as they look to design services, strategic messaging and sales tactics that will help overcome perceived barriers to adoption. According to the findings, 46 percent of respondents currently have IaaS in use, and an additional 12 percent plan to implement it in the next 12 months. That leaves a significant 42 percent of businesses that are not using public cloud or planning to in the near future, say 451 analysts. Looking at things strictly from a demographic view point, few surprises emerge. Smaller businesses are more likely to be late adopters of public cloud, with IaaS penetration showing a fairly linear increase along with company size by headcount – from 34 percent among small businesses to 66 percent among large businesses. Similarly, usage increases with company revenue, while the inverse is true when it comes to company age; the highest usage rates are among companies under five years old, and the late adopters are more likely to be among the older businesses. Companies in certain vertical markets also are more likely to be late adopters. Public cloud usage is lowest among companies in the utilities business and the public sector, show 451 figures. Perhaps somewhat less expected, the majority of late adopters did not site organiza- tional issues within their businesses as the primary barriers to adoption, and IT-environ- ment-based inhibitors were the least likely to be named. Among organizational issues iden- tified, the issues most commonly noted are loss of control (23%), difficulty of integrating with the existing IT environment (20%) and limits of internal resources (18%). More than one in 10 identified no organizational issues at all. And while 23 percent cited either the incompatibility of software currently running internally or an existing investment in owned or leased datacenter facilities as the characteristics creating barriers to public cloud, a full quarter of respondents indicated that none of the inhibitors to their use of public cloud re- side within their own IT environment. Indeed, despite the relative maturity of the public cloud and IaaS, “the cloud itself was most strongly identified as the location of barriers to adoption,” says Liam Eagle, research manager at 451. Just 9 percent identified no cloud-based inhibitors to public cloud use, while the familiar fears surrounding security and pricing structure topped the list of cloud-based inhibitors. Concerns with security were particularly prevalent, as 51 percent of non-adopter respondents identified data and application security as a top-two inhibitor. Overall, businesses not currently using public cloud were comparatively unconcerned with traits such as the reliability of public cloud vendors (13%), the multi-tenancy of the platform (11%) and the difficulty of moving workloads out of public cloud (8%), show 451 findings. “Overcoming deeply rooted beliefs that public cloud is inherently insecure is a challenge that cloud-enablement specialists must overcome,” says Eagle. “The capacity to change that perception or to address specific security requirements may make these specialists essential to the cloud-transformation initiatives of this type of late-adopter client.” The good news for cloud enablers is that counterarguments to some of the beliefs about inhibitors are well established, argues Eagle. “There are many examples of well-executed, compliant security policies in the public cloud – in many cases more secure than what businesses are doing on-premises – and an optimized cloud deployment can be more cost-effective than executing internally, especially where it facilitates some consolidation of the existing datacenter footprint,” he says. So while overcoming mistrust of public cloud may take some market-education efforts by service providers, “in some ways,” concludes Eagle, “the skeptical stance of the late adopters makes them ideal candidates for the services of cloud enablers.” Martin Vilaboy Editor-in-Chief martin@bekabusinessmedia.com Gerald Baldino Contributing Editor gerald@bekabusinessmedia.com Percy Zamora Art Director percy@bekabusinessmedia.com Berge Kaprelian Group Publisher berge@bekabusinessmedia.com (480) 503-0770 Rene Galan Associate Publisher rene@bekabusinessmedia.com (786) 953-7297 Anthony Graffeo Associate Publisher anthony@bekabusinessmedia.com (203) 304-8547 Matt O’Brien Multimedia Specialist matt@bekabusinessmedia.com Beka Business Media Berge Kaprelian President and CEO Neil Ende General Counsel Corporate Headquarters 15560 N Frank Lloyd Wright Blvd Suite B4 – 5433 Scottsdale, AZ 85260 Voice: 480.503.0770 Fax: 480.503.0990 Email: berge@bekabusinessmedia.com © 2019 Beka Business Media, All rights reserved. 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