It was once thought the only safe cloud option for businesses was a private or hybrid cloud model. But that’s no longer the case, according to a new survey. It finds that most organizations use at least some public cloud services, but that challenges abound.
According to information by SADA Systems, 84% of organizations use the public cloud. Of those, the top three choices for providers were:
- Google Cloud Platform (49%)
- Microsoft Azure (48%), and
- Amazon Web Services (42%).
While there were a variety of reasons for using public cloud, the biggest factors were cost, flexibility and security (58%). Other reasons included an inability to handle services in-house (16%) and feeling it would be a better long-term investment than keeping data centers up and running.
These are certainly good reasons for transitioning, but be aware: The move to the cloud isn’t always smooth, and there can be short- and long-term stumbling blocks.
User, staffing issues
While many companies said they were able to complete a transition to the public cloud in less than three months (23%) or three to six months (43%), others took considerably longer.
For eight percent of companies, that transition actually took more than a full calendar year.
And it wasn’t always smooth sailing. A quarter of those surveyed (25%) said their internal team lacked the skills to support the transition. And a whopping 61% said their teams had the ability to handle the transition, but they faced significant push-back from end users.
Third-parties can help
While IT often has the mentality that it can hunker down and accomplish tasks in-house, it seems most organizations that used a third-party were happy with the results:
- 43% of those surveyed said they used a third-party in the past and would again in the future
- 29% said they wanted to use more third-party services than they did, and
- 26% didn’t use a third-party in their initial transition, but expressed interest in doing so for the next time.
It’s not surprising this is the case. For a huge, months-long process, IT will want as many allies and supporters as it can get. Just know that these services may have large up-front costs, but the real benefit could be freeing up your team for other projects.
3 keys for public cloud adoption
With that in mind, here are three things you may want to take away from these survey results:
- Prepare everyone. It’s not enough to get your team on board for a public cloud transition. Users need to be kept in the loop on the process, too. Training may be a thing of the past for many organizations when it comes to IT matters, but know that if your users aren’t ready or don’t know what to expect, the early push-back from the transition will be a difficult thing to deal with.
- Set a realistic timeline. If you want to leave yourself extra time for a transition, that can help. But be careful not to set such a tight deadline that you’ll be struggling to complete everything on time. That could lead to dissatisfaction with the entire process and look bad if deadlines are missed.
- Decide early if you’ll go it alone. It’s certainly possible to have an entire transition handled in-house. It’s also possible to have a bad experience with a third-party. The one thing you probably won’t want to do, however, is change your mind half way through on which approach you’ll take. That makes vetting third-parties, even if you think you’ll go it alone, important.
