Dive Brief:
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The cloud has given way to emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and blockchain and has led 91% of organizations to adopt at least some form of cloud computing, according to a CompTIA survey of about 500 U.S. businesses. More IT expenditure is directed toward the cloud and "as a Service" offerings.
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Many companies go through a secondary migration after an initial move. Secondary moves are motivated by better offerings, security features, cost, "more open standards" or issues with outages, according to the report. Nearly 70% of cloud users turn to another cloud provider for their secondary migration while 40% migrate to a private cloud. The remaining 28% select an on-premise system.
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Until recently, AI followed the same interest pattern as the cloud in terms of involvement in IT conversations, but the emerging tech surpassed cloud interest not long after October 2016. However, cybersecurity and the IoT have yet to eclipse interest in the cloud.
Dive Insight:
The whole cloud market is forecast to hit about $554 billion globally by 2021 — and for good reason. The cloud helped bring IT to the forefront of overall business decisions and enabled IT professionals to play a more strategic role in modernizing an organization.
Half of companies need to build new cloud usage policies following deployment, according to the survey. Policies are needed because about half of CIOs said their allocated cloud budget is a top concern because consumption increases after implementation.
Overconsumption is made possible when overprovisioned resources are stored for just in case purposes, resulting in costly consumption of additional bandwidth. To control the sense of computing freedom users may feel after moving to the cloud, governance is needed.
But adopting the cloud reduced the number of IT employees for more than one-fifth of survey respondents. To combat the stress of a reduced IT staff while handling a new technology, organizations need to have cloud expertise in-house. After all, a shortage of expertise in cloud operations cost companies more than $258 million a year.
Cloud vendors are increasingly offering cloud management tools in services for cost optimization, governance and monitoring. But experts advise turning to a DevOps tool chain and infrastructure as core technologies to supplement default management tools from cloud providers.