Computerworld

NZ enterprise embraces cloud as Aussie organisations lag behind

New Zealand has a higher percentage of organisations with a cloud infrastructure in place with Australia lagging behind in terms of cloud adoption.

New Zealand has a higher percentage of organisations with a cloud infrastructure in place (92 percent) with Australia lagging behind (78 percent) in terms of cloud adoption.

According to Red Hat’s inaugural Cloud Adoption Index, Kiwi businesses also indicated a higher deployment of hybrid cloud at 45 percent, but only 15 percent has adopted public cloud.

Across the Australia and New Zealand region, findings suggest that planning for cloud adoption is not very advanced as yet but in New Zealand specifically, 27 percent of organisations are in “advanced planning stages” while 33 percent are still in the beginning stages of their cloud strategy.

Increased agility was also identified as the top priority for New Zealand organisations looking at cloud deployment, cited by 80 percent of respondents.

Decreasing costs was also a key priority at 73 percent, while increasing innovation ranked lowest with only 39 percent of respondents indicating this as a key goal.

"We can see that locally in the New Zealand market many large organisations are nervous about immersing themselves fully in public cloud offerings,” says Derek Wilson, Country Manager NZ, Red Hat.

“Instead, they are opting for an open hybrid cloud strategy, using on-premise environments for traditional production workloads and looking at public cloud either for additional capacity or for workloads such as micro-sites for marketing campaigns.”

Security

According to Wilson, security continues to be an issue for organisations when adopting cloud services with 47.5 percent of New Zealand organisations experiencing security issues.

Furthermore, 40 percent of organisations report that ‘onboarding or offboarding’ turned out to be more difficult than first thought with 40 percent also admitting that the solutions didn’t interoperate with current systems.

Unintended cost (32.5 percent) and increased costs (30 percent) were also highlighted as issues when adopting cloud solutions.

Delving deeper, almost one in three respondents (27 percent) claim that security concerns and data sovereignty concerns were the biggest barrier to cloud adoption.

“Security should be top of mind when it comes to an organisation's applications and data in the cloud,” adds Max McLaren, regional VP and GM A/NZ, Red Hat.

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“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.

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“Business leaders should take action to reduce the risk of shadow IT replacing approved IT in the organisation.”

From a New Zealand perspective, there is also a growing interest in Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings.

“Many companies are starting to use PaaS to build services and solutions which let their customers use the right tools and technology to rapidly create and deploy custom applications and services, and to improve the delivery of applications to internal and external users in areas such as mobile access and usability,” Wilson adds.

Open source on the rise

Open source also plays a significant role in cloud strategy and architecture, with survey respondents clearly understanding the benefits offered by open source technologies.

The biggest benefit, cited by 29.3 percent of respondents, was open source’s interoperability with existing infrastructure, followed by architecture flexibility (28 percent).

Open source is already the foundation for many popular cloud services and enterprise applications and these responses reflect the general trend towards open source in many aspects of the IT industry.

According to McLaren, the right cloud choices can lead to improved business efficiency and agility allowing CIOs yo improve their organisation’s competitiveness, flexibility and IT economics for the next decade or more by making the right choices when starting their cloud journey.

“Most organisations seem to understand that the cloud can help them achieve strategic goals around improving overall business efficiency and agility, but to take advantage of cloud in the next few years, these organisations will need to ramp up their planning and improve their internal communication about cloud,” he says.

“An effective cloud strategy can transform the IT department from a break-fix and maintenance provider to a driver of innovation, and help internal teams improve efficiency and productivity.

“Resources used previously to simply maintain operations can now be channelled to better respond to market changes and business opportunities.”