“As local data centres become more common and security measures continue to evolve, these issues are likely to reduce in importance over time.”
Cloud barrier
At a regional level, almost one in three respondents (28 percent) claimed that the biggest barrier to cloud adoption was that their IT architecture was not suitable.
“Not everything can be moved to the cloud to replace current systems.
Business users in particular need to understand the level of detailed planning required to make sure that legacy applications, for example, can work in the cloud.
“Cloud transformation isn’t as simple as ‘lift and shift’ but requires planning around legacy systems and newer systems to see how they can interact and integrate,” McLaren adds.
“When it comes to bringing new applications into production in a timely manner, application architecture (47 percent) and complex middleware software (43 percent) were highlighted as significant barriers.
“This highlights the need for modern, easy-to-use middleware software that makes building and integrating cloud applications more simple.”
Business leaders must take action to prevent shadow IT
The survey showed that cloud has support throughout organisations, with CEO and board support at 46 percent.
Paradoxically, only 13.3 percent of organisations are using Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) with full senior management approval.
“Organisations using cloud technologies without senior management approval tend to do so because they cannot get the speed and agility they need from existing, approved organisational systems,” McLaren adds.
“This practice has created a culture of ‘shadow IT’. Using these unapproved cloud implementations without the IT department’s oversight can make the business user’s job easy in the short term, but can lead to security breaches, additional costs, and IT silos in the longer term.