The top reasons South African businesses migrate to public cloud is to enable innovation, to leverage new technologies that are only available in the cloud, and to benefit from scalability for applications.
This was revealed in a recent online survey, conducted by ITWeb and Nutanix, which set out to examine the state of public cloud adoption and execution strategy among South African businesses.
“We are still seeing cloud as a separate place that is distinct from a business’s current infrastructure and data centre – for example public clouds like AWS or Azure vs on-premise environments,” comments Paul Ruinaard, regional sales director Sub-Saharan Africa, Nutanix. “But this is slowly changing, and we are starting to see this blend. The primary driver for cloud should simply be to deliver applications to the business in a better way than how they are currently being delivered.”
Just over half the respondents (52%) reported they are fully in control of their cloud usage, with use of public cloud being strictly governed and centrally controlled by IT.
“As companies mature and their cloud deployments mature the rigour that comes with running operations in the cloud will improve,” says Ruinaard. “Old school mainframe architectures are very well managed and run so the operational rigour around them is well developed/mature. The cloud in our region is, however, in its infancy and the skills to support it are nascent. As more users move to the cloud and their skills develop, so will the market, usage, behaviour, skills, and understanding of cloud mature.
“However, there are going to be a few more learnings along the way that will come with associated ‘costs’ - like knowing which workloads are suited to what deployment models and where there are cost overruns that a company can better manage and coordinate so that they can better understand where their “cloud costs” are coming from. These are two of the most common, currently validated experiences among users.”
According to this survey, a quarter of respondents (25%) have already completed the execution of their public cloud strategy. For a large percentage (43%), however, this goal is more than a year and even up to five years away. We asked Ruinaard whether or not there was an urgency to migrate to public cloud.
It’s important that businesses consider which workloads are suited to the cloud, comments Ruinaard.
“Some workloads will remain on-premise forever, others will migrate, it will all relate to what a business needs and what makes the most cost sense to them. Infrastructure for the most part and for many businesses will remain hybrid for the foreseeable future. However, there will be a shift in how on-prem workloads are run and managed – namely they will be run and managed more like the cloud.”
About a third of participating say they have policies and business approval for consuming public cloud, while close to 60% are still working on it.
Predictably, the top challenges experienced with the ‘cloud-first’ strategy, are security and, cost. With cloud requiring different skillsets over legacy IT, and the general skills shortage, it’s somewhat surprising that only a third of respondents (31%) find it difficult to develop or acquire these new skills; Only 11% of respondents are running 100% of their workloads in the cloud; 22% estimate this to be about 75%, and another 23% have half of their workloads in the cloud.
The overwhelming majority of participants (80%) see their IT cloud adoption strategy requiring both public and private cloud.
“Hybrid equals public and private combined with a control plane across both with cloud-like solutions,” says Ruinaard. “It’s the true end-state operating model. It allows businesses to better control their risks and their costs.”
About the survey
The 2020 ITWeb/Nutanix Cloud Survey was conducted on ITWeb during April and was completed by 214 respondents.
Of those, 69% are decision-makers – 29% are C-level executives, while a further 40% are at mid-management level.
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