Navigating cloud migrations: entering the multi-cloud era

How to navigate cloud migration

News By Matt Tebay published 8 October 2024

Given how prevalent it is, you might be forgiven for thinking that everything is in the cloud today. But according to the latest research from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF), the average amount of IT infrastructure hosted in the cloud by any one company is currently hovering around 50%. In fact, only 7% of organizations currently have more than 80% of their infrastructure in the cloud – but at the other end of the spectrum, only 8% of businesses have less than 20% of their IT in the cloud.

In short, the cloud is mature, but nowhere near universal.

And when it comes to future adoption, almost half (42%) of businesses have a ‘cloud first’ policy, with 55% taking a hybrid approach. Only a small number of organizations (2%) currently keep IT on-premises wherever possible, so there’s ample evidence that cloud is well and truly a proven technology today.

Furthermore, many organizations are now using more than one cloud, fitting the cloud to the workload, rather than the other way around. We’ll look at what this means a bit later, but first, let’s look at some of the common benefits and challenges of migrating from on-premises to cloud.

Matt Tebay

Multi-Cloud Evangelist at OVHcloud.

Cloud’s mature era: The benefits

The main benefits of cloud are well-understood. According to CIF, IT professionals adopt cloud to improve agility (32%), increase ease of scaling (29%) and gain cost savings (29%). One of cloud’s main benefits is that it can be tested, spun up and turned off at the drop of a hat, allowing organizations to only use the resources they need, when they need them.

Furthermore, a whopping 81% of organizations believe that cloud makes their IT estate either significantly or slightly more mature than using purely on-premises infrastructure. This is largely for two reasons: firstly, most cloud providers offer security at scale. They invest in the greatest and most resilient security with both physical and digital security constantly being tested and evolved. Secondly, although a larger IT estate means a higher number of endpoints to secure, it also means a more dispersed estate, so any one outage is less likely to have a great impact.

However, migrating to the cloud is a difficult journey. In fact, half of IT decision-makers say that migration was more complex than expected. Let’s look at some of these challenges.

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