30 January 2014

IT leaders are seriously underestimating the job of migrating to the cloud, says Alsbridge’s John Sheridan.

Cloud is still a relatively small investment for the UK’’s largest organisations and is failing to meet IT leaders’’ expectations, according to sourcing advisor Alsbridge.

It consulted 50 senior IT decisionmakers around the UK and found large mismatches between the expectations and the real-life results that cloud was giving.

For instance, 74 per cent expected operational cost savings but only 41 per cent saw any significant reductions. Efficiency was also lacking with 59 per cent expecting tangible benefits and only 35 per cent feeling that they’’d seen the results they had hoped for.

“Cloud has been hyped-up by consultants and suppliers alike for many years, but in truth there is still caution around its wider adoption beyond SaaS and ‘‘sand-boxed’’ platforms,”” says John Sheridan, director and head of IT outsourcing, Alsbridge.

The survey showed that with those who had invested in cloud solutions, SaaS had been adopted by 70 per cent, whereas other solutions trailed far behind with PaaS at 32 per cent, computational IaaS at 20 per cent, and storage IaaS at 14 per cent. Sheridan blames a lack of investment as many respondents claimed that barely a fifth of annual IT budgets are spent on externally managed cloud computing accounts.

Alsbridge also discovered that almost two thirds cite data sovereignty and privacy as their top concern to adopting more cloud services. A tenth said legacy applications were their biggest problem, whilst one in twenty felt they lacked the necessary skills.

Sheridan believes that these are not unreasonable worries. ““What concerned me most was the limited recognition of key risk factors. Based on our experience of the primary challenges, IT leaders are seriously underestimating the job of migrating to the cloud,”” he warns.