This result from the ‘From Cloud Migration to Digital Innovation’ report by Capita comes despite cloud migration coming out on top as the area that most respondents (72%) said was top priority.
Coming in behind cloud migration in this department was digital transformation (61%), process automation (45%), and big data analytics (40%).
Perceived upsides
In terms of reasons given for migrating to the cloud, 61% of participating companies cited reduced cost, while improved speed of delivery was identified by 57%, and increased IT security by 52%.
Additionally, 86% said that the benefits that cloud adoption brought outweighed any downsides, while 76% declared improved IT service since moving to the cloud.
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“Cloud adoption is a critical foundational step towards opening up real transformative opportunities offered by cloud-native technologies and emerging digital platforms and services,” said Wasif Afghan, head of cloud and platform services at Capita.
“While some forward-thinking organisations are able to keep their eye on the goal, the complexity of the migration and application modernisation process tends to introduce delays and cost implications that slow down progress.”
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The most frequent challenges that companies identified when it comes to adopting cloud technologies was security (43%), followed by a lack of internal skills (34%), getting budget approval (32%) and progressing legacy migration systems (32%).
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Also, over half of respondents said that they had to ‘rearchitect’ and optimise more workloads in preparation for cloud migration than expected, while just 27% said that labour or logistical costs had decreased.
“Every migration journey is unique in both its destination and starting point,” Afghan continued. “While some organisations are either ‘born in the cloud’ or can gather the resources to transform in a relatively short space of time, the majority will have a much slower, more complex path.
“Many larger organisations that have been established for a long time will have heritage IT systems and traditional processes that can’t simply be lifted and shifted to the cloud straight away due to commercial or technical reasons, meaning a hybrid IT approach is often required.
“Many organisations haven’t yet fully explored how they can make hybrid work for them, combining the benefits of newer cloud services whilst operating and optimising their heritage IT estate.”
Capita surveyed 200 IT executives from UK companies that had more than 500 employees for this report.
