Dive Brief:

• The way a company migrates to the cloud is changing. Instead of "lift and shift," embracing a "lift and extend" strategy helps stave off unnecessary spend, according to a 451 Research survey of 450 enterprise IT decision makers. The other most effective ways of migration include refactoring applications, rewriting existing applications using PaaS and replacing applications with third-party SaaS.

• The majority of organizations are motivated by "best execution venue" for using an infrastructure running on multiple clouds, according to the report. The other leading factors are top cloud-native services and steering clear of a lock-in with one provider.

• Over the next 12 to 24 months, less than half of respondents said that they intend to run 51% to 75% of their applications on the cloud. Only one-fifth of respondents said they will have more than 75% of their applications modernized. More than half of respondents still have 51%-75% of applications running on their on-premise infrastructure.

Dive Insight:

Many companies embrace a hybrid approach to running applications on the cloud and on on-premise servers because IT departments have uncertainty about what applications are best for running on the cloud. Typically CRM, ERP, data analytics and collaboration platforms are the applications companies find least suited for a modern infrastructure, according to the report.

But picking up an entire infrastructure in the hopes of fully modernizing is a bigger lift than organizations want to deal with. Additionally, communicating the need to shift to digital solutions can often be a roadblock for CIOs tasked with persuading their board of its importance.

Everything cannot be assigned a dollar figure. But to speak in terms that a board is willing to listen to and can understand, CIOs should represent each level of their framework with the "process" while only adding a sprinkling of technology. The mention of technology is only there to help articulate what is needed to complete that process, according to Tony Young, CIO of Sophos, while speaking at the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit in National Harbor, Maryland on Wednesday. 

Shifting to the cloud is just like any other process a CIO needs to convey to a room of superiors. However, if the process, and therefore the necessity of modernization, is not clearly communicated, it halts every other hope for digitizing infrastructure.