The popularity of Cloud computing over the past few years has been nothing short of astronomical. Its promise of significantly reducing costs, shedding unnecessary hardware, and helping many businesses immediately chop redundancies is part of the reason why so many CIO’s are looking towards the Cloud.
Yet, according to new research commissioned by Reconnix, 82% of UK IT professionals do no believe that they have the in-house skills to make the move to Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers. Out of the 100 IT leaders questions, 10% views their companies as ready to make the move to the Cloud, while 8% had already migrated or were in the process.
On the contrary, and perhaps most surprisingly, it was shown that only 7% of respondents thought their in-house team was capable of moving and managing an IaaS environment. The rest of the respondents said they had most in-house skills (39%), while the majority believe their IT team had some skills required.
The survey also revealed that Microsoft Azure was identified as the most trusted cloud vendor (36%), while IBM’s SmartCloud came close with 22%. Interestingly, Amazon Web Services and Rackspace fell short with only 14% IT professionals trusting the service.
Steve Nice, CTO at Reconnix, admitted that he was surprised at Azure’s and IBM’s leadership in the survey,
“The prominence of Azure and IBM in IT buyers minds is surprising, especially considering how far ahead AWS is, both technically and in terms of market share,” explained Nice. “IT departments not used to buying cloud services can sometimes not be aware of the difference in levels of performance between IaaS providers and it can be tempting to choose a trusted name”.
The survey also revealed that 32% of respondent believe cost to be a main motivating factor for moving to the Cloud, but this was also seen as one of the biggest barriers also (30%). Flexibility and increased computing power were also identified as significant motivating factors, with 30% claiming the former and 18% the latter.
“There’s a very clear desire for businesses to move applications away from traditional environments and towards Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers,” Rice continued. “however a lack of adequate skills seem to be holding back many IT departments from making this move. It’s natural for businesses to err on the side of caution, but this conservative approach can mean that many are missing out on the transformative benefits of the cloud.”
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(Image Credit: Kenny Louie)
