New Zealand businesses, much like their Australian counterparts, are considered global frontrunners when it comes to moving business processes to the cloud.
However, many CIOs still fear security risks and compatibility issues, and are not fully prepared to get the most from a move to cloud, according to the 2015 Red Hat ANZ Cloud Adoption Index.
“The survey revealed that many business leaders are still reluctant to let go of the traditional model of capital expenditure, hardware budgets and data centres,” says Max McLaren, regional vice president and general manager A/NZ, Red Hat.
As a result, Red Hat has identified three main barriers to cloud adoption:
1. Security risks
McLaren says security should be top of mind when it comes to an organisation's applications and data in the cloud.
In fact, data sovereignty and security concerns continue to be an issue for organisations looking to consume cloud services, with 60 percent of respondents experiencing security issues.
“Choosing a hybrid cloud management platform lets organisations use policy-based enforcement techniques across multiple cloud providers and virtualisation systems, quarantining systems that are not up to the required standard,” McLaren adds.
The Red Hat Cloud Adoption survey also revealed that many companies fear their applications won’t be suitable for deployment into IaaS or PaaS.
Of the respondents, 38 percent believe that less than 40 percent of their existing applications would fit into a cloud architecture.
“Not every application can be moved to the cloud, so any cloud strategy must take into account the proportion of applications that can be moved immediately, those that need to be integrated, and those that will never be suitable for cloud deployment,” McLaren adds.
“Cloud transformation isn’t as simple as a ‘lift and shift’ but requires planning around legacy systems and newer systems to see how they can interact and integrate.”
3. Inconsistent or lack of planning
McLaren says organisations that want to move to the cloud seamlessly and effectively must prepare appropriately.
According to the Red Hat Cloud Adoption survey, cloud planning is not advanced in Australia and New Zealand - only 22.7 percent say they are in the advanced planning stages, which means 77.3 percent may be left behind.
“A well-executed cloud strategy delivers benefits including increased agility, shorter application deployment times, increased efficiency and reduced costs through virtualisation, less on-premise infrastructure and faster computing performance,” McLaren adds.
“Once CIOs are aware of these three main barriers, they can develop a cloud strategy to overcome these obstacles and improve their organisation’s competitiveness, cost efficiency and agility.”