A change is gonna come to the cloud strategy of most organizations in the next few years, according to a recent Rackspace Technology report.
According to the report, which came out earlier this month, 90% of IT leaders say they will make “significant changes” in their cloud strategy within the next two years.
The survey, which was conducted by global market research agency Coleman Parkes Research and commissioned by the San Antonio, Texas-based cloud computing company, queried 1,420 technology decision-makers across 10 sectors, including retail and financial services.
Marc Kermisch, CTO of Emergent Software, told IT Brew that the widespread desire among IT leaders to refurbish their organization’s cloud strategy is likely fueled by cost concerns among these enterprise organizations.
“What they’re finding is they’ve gone into cloud compute and they’re seeing an uncontrollable growth of their cloud spends,” Kermisch said, adding that in some cases, organizations are seeing their cloud spend 100% or 200% over budget.
Anand Babu Periasamy, co-founder and CEO of MinIO, an object storage system company, added that the desire to have control over data in the era of GenAI is another catalyst for cloud strategy revisions.
Hybrid work(s)! Many IT leaders with plans to overhaul their cloud strategy are betting on a hybrid cloud environment to be a vital part of their remarket, with 48% claiming that hybrid cloud for multi-environment deployment will be “critical” to their IT operations in the next couple of years. Another 22% said they planned to expand their hybrid cloud capabilities.
Top insights for IT pros
From cybersecurity and big data to cloud computing, IT Brew covers the latest trends shaping business tech in our 4x weekly newsletter, virtual events with industry experts, and digital guides.
Liz Fong-Jones, field CTO at Honeycomb, told us that the “most compelling case” for organizations considering hybrid cloud is that it can be a “dramatically cheaper” option compared to public and private cloud.
“If you suddenly need two times as many servers, or three times as many servers, and you’re running on-prem entirely, you’re not going to have the ability to fulfill that,” Fong-Jones said. “So, that’s why people are seeing cost savings off of hybrid cloud because they can run their baseline workload, which is the majority of what they’re paying for.”
Private eye. Organizations also have their gaze on the private cloud. About 20% of respondents said they planned on increasing their private cloud investments in the next two years. Almost seven in 10 (69%) also said that their organization has considered repatriating at least a portion of their workload from public back to private cloud or an on-premise infrastructure, a trend that Fong-Jones also attributes to organizations having cost concerns on their mind.
“I think it’s the sticker shock, right?” Fong-Jones said. “People are like, ‘Wait, I am spending how much money on my cloud bill?’”