In its second report of a three-part series on the CIO in 2017, Trustmarque has revealed the key drivers behind cloud migration and the need for simpler app migration.
The report found that the majority (91%) of UK CIOs and IT decision makers want to migrate their on-premise apps to IaaS, PaaS or SaaS clouds within the next three to five years. On average, they are planning to move at least almost half of them (48%) within this period. The report also showed that this figure is significantly greater for CIOs in the public sector with over half (55%) versus those in the private sector at only just over two-thirds (40%).
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Driving this surge in cloud app migration are several key business benefits. The report found that the biggest one for almost two-thirds (61%) of CIOs is the cost savings to be made from migration.
This was closely followed by almost two-thirds (60%) of them citing the advantage of scalability, with just over half (51%) stating improving their businesses ability to deliver projects and new requirements quicker is the driver. Further, almost half (49%) revealed that retiring existing infrastructure and the need to add new features and updates more frequently (48%) drive migration.
James Butler, CTO at Trustmarque, said: “Cloud-based models of IT delivery have a wide range of benefits that cannot be fully unlocked without transforming the architectural and IT organisation, which is never trivial. Simple lift and shift projects are not enough to do that and may struggle to achieve a good return on investment. These projects may create new technical debt and uncontrolled cloud sprawl that needs to be unpicked sooner rather than later.”
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“It’s vital customers put in place both the underpinning foundations for the new controls and operating model that are common across clouds, along with a holistic strategy that covers new innovation as well as the pre-existing IT estate. With those in place they can safely build and deliver the application roadmaps to move to the cloud. There is no one-size-fits-all or silver bullet to cloud adoption and application migration.”
“CIOs and IT decision makers do clearly appreciate the benefits for their businesses from effective migration. However, many are wary of the potential pitfalls and challenges to migration. The latest report shows that more than half of CIOs do still feel that the complexity of their existing infrastructure can slow down adoption, plus a third recognise that their own in-house expertise may not on its own be enough, while nearly three-quarters see the process of modernising these apps as slowing their journey to the cloud.”
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Despite benefits to the IT function and the wider business, cloud app migration remains a resource-intensive task requiring highly skilled practitioners. The report suggested several factors make it increasingly important to seek out a trusted third party to help with the process and provide all-important subject-matter expertise.
“We see customers grappling with legacy application modernisation at the same time as investing in innovation, building micro-services, using PaaS and exploring concepts like serverless and immutable infrastructure,” continued Butler.
“Alongside the core technology, they have to change their information governance model and financial controls to ensure they can safely unlock the value of cloud. There is a real need to simplify these and other key challenges that CIOs face in app migration.”
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