We at Savant have had many conversations with CTOs and CIOs who reveal to us what seems to be a set of the same consistent myths about the cloud and thus what is holding said companies back from capturing the full benefits that the cloud has to offer.
For the most part, this delay in cloud adoption in some companies does not stem because of a lack of ambition. But, many company leaders have encountered major roadblocks along their path towards the cloud or have gotten cold feet once they questioned its impact on costs, security, latency, and more.
But while historic predictions anticipated that upwards of 16% of enterprise workloads would be in the cloud—by 2019, there is a clear lag in 2021’s actual figure, which is half as large, at less than 9 percent.
While other companies who have effectively counteracted these myths are the ones that have derived the greatest rewards from their move to cloud.
So what are the common misconceptions about the cloud? Well, the most common we hear a lot are cited below in points numbers 1, 2 and 3, and these roadblocks and questions seem to be hampering the progress and adoption of the cloud.
Myth #1: The main value of the cloud is IT cost reductions.
This is the top industry misconception - this is to have likely come from the introduction of the cloud which refers to the replacement of IT activities such as access to on demand infrastructure, storage and data centers, database services and many more. While all of these descriptors are accurate, business leaders often lose sight and look at the bigger picture. This micro picture neglects the macro on transforming the full IT operating model and more importantly on a business level too. This means that leaders typically focus on the “on premises” costs and compare this to the cloud costs instead of honing in on what should be the main value driver of the cloud - the business benefits.
The reality is that the aggregation of business benefits outweighs IT costs efficiencies in the cloud. Any one of a number of cloud enabled initiatives - such as improved analytics, faster time to market, stronger innovation - all of which can generate a greate incremental contribution than IT cost reductions. Cloud can improve almost every aspect of an organisation’s products, services, or processes . All of these examples drive revenue growth opportunities in a variety of ways, including acceleration of new product lead time, entry into new markets, and response to competitive threats.
The common thread in these examples, and many more, is that the ultimate reason to move to cloud should be the business benefits rather than IT efficiencies.
Myth #2: The security on the cloud is not secure.
Security has historically been one of the top concerns and a barrier to cloud adoption for business leaders.
In recent years, however, all major cloud vendors have made significant investments to their underlying security capabilities by investing billions in cloud security not to hire thousands of top cyber experts.
They have developed an array of new tools and methods to make cloud secure, in many cases requiring developers to take on the security responsibility, rather than relying on a traditional security team to carry the burden. This is particularly important because public cloud breaches have almost all been driven by enterprise customers’ insecure configurations. Gartner, in fact, predicts that, through 2025, 99% of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault, not the security provider’s.
Developers have therefore been trained to follow carefully defined governance and policies on how to configure the right security controls. For example, if it is policy that data must be encrypted, it is up to the developers to invoke the correct application programming interface, telling the cloud vendor that they want their data in a given storage bucket to be encrypted.
The key question for companies, therefore, is not whether cloud is more secure to begin with, but what measures they need to take themselves to enhance their cloud security such as encrypting their data.
It is up to the company to define these correct policies, adopt a secure DevSecOps operating model, and train or hire the right talent to achieve safer operations in their cloud environments than keeping them on-premises.
Myth #3: To move to cloud, you must either lift and shift applications as they are today or refactor them entirely.
Once companies make the commitment to move to the cloud, they are often faced with pressure to move fast, minimize costs, and maximize business benefits.
As a result, leaders feel the pressure to choose between a quicker and cheaper “lift and shift” transition strategy (i.e. to move fast and minimize costs) and a time-intensive and costly refactoring strategy to capture on business benefits as soon as possible.
While the “lift and shift” application of dropping it into cloud as it is can be a faster and more cost-effective way to move many applications into cloud at once, it fails to harness the majority of cloud’s benefits.
That’s because there is no change to the application’s architecture, which is often not optimized for cloud and so won’t benefit from features like autoscaling, automated performance management, and more. Furthermore, the non-native application will likely face higher security issues or other performance issues from this transition.
On the other hand, a complete refactoring of the company’s former data storage and its architecture to optimize for cloud takes a lot of resources such as time, skill, and money. While it achieves the benefits that lift and shift ignores, it is too tedious, slow and typically requires great amounts of money that the total cost is often way too high to even breakeven. It also puts the transition at the same greater risk of error during complex recoding, configuration, and integration.
Many companies therefore then find they are better off using a “best of both worlds” strategy that takes advantage of specific techniques such as automation, abstraction, and containerization.
These techniques are less costly and time-consuming than full refactorization but still allow companies to achieve the business benefits of greater agility, faster time to market, and enhanced resiliency. By combining both of these approaches companies are able to refactor less costs than full refactorization but still allow the companies to benefit from agility and additional techniques that lift and shift would have ignored.
Many of today’s beliefs about cloud are based on misconceptions fed by fears of adoptions or resistance to significant change. These beliefs get in the way of deeply understanding the positive business, operational, and economic impacts of cloud and must be addressed to enable organizations to capture cloud’s full value.
At Savant Technology Recruitment, we can help you to recruit top talent within the current marketplace across the cloud.
Savant Technology offers a range of recruitment and search services across Cloud, Salesforce, Transformation & Change, Analytics & Data, Security & Architecture, Development & Testing and Infrastructure & Operations. For more information please visit www.savantrecruitment.com or contact our technology team directly on technology@savantrecruitment.com
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