Performance Upgrades, Automation, Even Security, Fuel Cloud Migration
The wholesale lift and shift of enterprise applications and databases from on-premise datacenters to the cloud is being driven by considerations such as improved network bandwidth, scaling ability, higher availability and the rise of cloud-native applications.
Another unexpected reason, according to a vendor IT infrastructure management survey released this week, is improved cloud security, a consideration cited by more than one third of IT managers polled by Internap Corp. (NASDAQ: INAP), the datacenter, cloud and networking specialist.
The annual survey released Wednesday (Nov. 20) found that nine of ten organizations said they plan to move some workloads to the cloud or to managed or colocation services within the next three years. A majority expressed a desire to offload routine, administrative operations to a managed cloud service.
Nearly seven in ten respondents said they have deployed hybrid infrastructure to handle more workloads. Only 32 percent said they use a single hosted platform, including bare metal, private or public clouds.
“The results show IT professionals would much rather spend their time assessing their systems for outsourcing—cloud readiness—or designing complex multi-service environments rather than performing routine tasks which can be easily outsourced, such as monitoring their infrastructure,” said Jennifer Curry, INAP’s senior vice president global cloud services.
For the second consecutive year, nearly half of those polled said infrastructure tasks like server monitoring and maintenance were the primary drain on their time. Many viewed the handoff of monitoring tasks and workloads to the cloud as a way to expand their job descriptions as infrastructure converges around automation and data analytics tools.
Moreover, IT managers said they are willing to spend more for better network performance and IT availability. Those and other factors foreshadow what the survey authors describe as a “compelling case for why the death of the on-premise datacenter is perhaps inevitable within the next decade.”
Indeed, hybrid IT and multi-cloud deployments are now a staple as enterprises seek, for example, to avoid vendor lock-in while offloading routine tasks to managed services. Those hosted services are making inroads with enterprise customers “up to the application layer,” the survey found.
INAP, Reston, Va., said it interviewed 508 IT administrators at Canadian and U.S. companies with more than 100 employees. The IT management survey was conducted in October.
