Kathy Gibson reports – The cloud market is evolving as companies shift how they deploy services, with the biggest trend today being the move to the decentralised cloud.
This is the word from Jon Tullett, associate research director: IT services sub-Saharan Africa at IDC, speaking at the IDC Cloud and Datacentre Roadshow in Johannesburg yesterday (15 March 2023).
“For the first time, this year we saw some absolutes in our survey,” he says. “And, for the first time, there was not a single negative response in terms of cloud investment, with 100% [of respondents] saying they are making strategic investments in the technology.”
In addition, 100% of South African CIOs have a hybrid cloud strategy in place, with all of them expecting to manage multiple clouds.
And every organisation says it will use external professional cloud services providers.
IDC tracks maturity in the cloud and found that – contrary to widely-held misconceptions – South African CIOs are actually leading the META (Middle East, Turkey and Africa) region in cloud adoption, moving applications into the cloud, and running cloud-native apps.
And, within the next year, we can expect South African organisations to have shifted even more applications into the cloud, Tullett says.
With more flavours of cloud available then ever before, not all apps will be going into public cloud, although we will see a big uptick in the adoption of platform as a service (PaaS), which reflects growing maturity.
There is also a lot of on-premise deployment happening, and this is expected to increase. On-premise private cloud is an area of high growth, mainly in standardised vendor stacks.
“The only big loser here is the traditional data centre,” Tullett says.
The co-location environment is also growing strongly, despite the increase in cloud deployments, with hosted private cloud growth seen to outweigh non-cloud co-location. The co-location environment also reflects an appetite for edge which, again, is growing strongly.
Industry clouds are set to increase too: 87% of CIOs say they plan to use industry clouds within the next 24 months.
With the variety of environments being deployed, complexity is growing too, Tullett says. “This leads to more challenges – like higher costs and fees than anticipated (55%), prolonged implementation/deployment (52%), migration difficulties, and poor integration.”
When it comes to execution, customers experience poor technical support, lack of governance, and poor availability.
Skills are a big issue and a growing risk, with a lack of training exacerbating the situation.
To simplify hybrid IT and cloud, organisations need to evolve from silos to a hybrid approach and then on to integrated platforms, with strategic underlying architectures.
“For instance, we are starting to see security as an enabler, rather than a hindrance, to digital transformation and agility,” Tullett says.
“Organisations need to absolutely fixate on user experience, both inside and outside the company,” he adds. Technologies like telemetry can be used to demonstrate improvements in this.
“Put your providers under the hammer and make them better align to your business,” Tullett advises. “Tighten the screws when it comes to contract terms and deliverables. Focus on business deliverables and insist on the services you require.
“These are the areas where we are seeing a lot of focus – and we think it will help to continue moving the momentum forward.”