Multi-Cloud Seen Driving Managed Services
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The steady enterprise shift to hybrid and multi-cloud deployments brings with it added layers of complexity as adopters seek to salvage some legacy infrastructure while migrating critical workloads to cloud-native frameworks. Those requirements are said to be creating greater demand for managed services designed to demystify the transition.
That’s among the conclusions of a vendor-sponsored study by 451 Research that found a glaring cloud skills gap as IT teams struggle to ramp up multi-cloud deployments. The study commissioned by Dell Technologies’ (NYSE: DELL) Virtustream unit found that nearly two-thirds of cloud users surveyed rely on managed services to bridge the skills gap.
Among the preferred managed cloud services are application migration and integration, data security and infrastructure monitoring, the market researcher found.
Multi-cloud adopters “are looking to cloud managed services partners to bridge their own in-house skills and resources gaps,” said study author Melanie Posey of 451 Research.
Among the other managed cloud services sought by adopters are data security and governance, performance optimization and so-called “Day 2” operational monitoring and management tools.
The study also notes that hybrid and multi-cloud deployments have become the “new normal,” with 57 percent of businesses surveyed shifting to hybrid infrastructure that leverages in-house systems with cloud and other hosted IT resources. At the same time, 72 percent of those polled said they are using more than one public cloud vendor (8 percent said they are using more than three) as enterprises seek to avoid vendor lock-in while embracing new cloud-based data analytics and other services.
The cloud migration is highlighting data security concerns and a lack of skills for securing sensitive data and workloads. Sixty percent of respondents identified data protection and security as the biggest workload-related challenge. Those concerns have grown with the emergence of micro-services running on popular but often vulnerable automation platforms like the Kubernetes cluster orchestrator used to manage application containers.
Data governance and compliance with data privacy rules were cited by 37 percent of respondents. “This can be boiled down to a lack of skills and human resources in-house, a need to transform business process as much if not more than IT operations,” Virtustream said in making its case it managed cloud services.
Demand for managed cloud services are expected to grow as more mission-critical applications move to the cloud. For example, 41 percent of companies surveyed by 451 research said they are moving key workloads like Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) and SAP (NYSE: SAP) databases to the cloud.
Indeed, cloud vendors are targeting these and other core business applications, then offering services for managing them via multi-cloud deployments.
The cloud study found that 35 percent of companies surveyed expect to shift to cloud-based application and infrastructure architectures while retaining legacy applications in-house. A smaller percentage said they would re-work existing apps using cloud-native frameworks.
The cloud migration report is available here.
