The last gasp of the no-cloud strategy

Cloud may not be the answer to everything, but it's now part of the furniture finds Computing's research

This year is the fifth since Computing began its annual research programme into the strategies pursued by data centre managers and CIOs to keep their facilities relevant, secure, available, efficient and up-to-date. In the early years cloud only played a bit part in this research, not that it wasn't perceived as important by our respondents, rather it was immature and at that stage few firms had taken the plunge in a serious way.

As recently as 2014, 52 per cent of our respondents reported that they used no cloud services at all; last year the equivalent figure was 15 per cent and this year it had dropped to just eight per cent.

The seven per cent who have discovered cloud in the last 12 months have jumped to the first rung - what we call ‘partial cloud' or ad hoc adoption. Further up the adoption ladder, the numbers of those with a cloud-first strategy and those describing themselves as ‘cloud-only' have barely shifted.

All of this shows that cloud is now thoroughly mainstream, with the naysayers dwindling to an ever smaller ever smaller minority. Most are using cloud as an add-on rather than a replacement. For most it is a case of mixing on-site and public cloud technology. We don't expect to see any change in the fundamentals of this picture for quite some time.

There was some variation in the pattern of adoption with company size, with large organisations more likely to have a cloud-first policy. One of the key advantages that cloud can deliver is the sort of flexibility that small firms take for granted but which larger organisations can find hard to achieve. A common feature these days is the setting up of ‘internal startups' within large organisations and tasking them with trying out new approaches as a defence against smaller more nimble opposition.

However, cloud is far from being the answer to every problem. There are many factors that still mitigate against its deployment, from a lack of maturity in some areas, to cultural difficulties and skills requirements, to pricing issues and sunk costs, to performance, latency and compliance. So while cloud is certainly opening up new possibilities it is not displacing data centre workloads at as quick a rate as might appear to be the case.

"The tool set is much more assured for on-premise, so managing an exchange is a lot better on-premise than it is managing it online," said an IT director in media, illustrating that cloud is not always superior.

"I'm consciously just focusing on ‘prove these systems will bloody run on the cloud'. That's my highest priority. It's getting better but still there's so much discomfort with just even the concept of not having your own lump of tin and a data centre on-premise," said a CIO in healthcare, demonstrating that many business and IT departments will not believe in the concept of cloud until some pretty stubborn perceptual barriers have been overcome with hard evidence.

The sunk cost dilemma was aired by the head of IT in a charity: "My previous employer was anti-cloud. I was at an accountancy firm and they said ‘well, we bought this and we'll get 10 years out of it so why do we want to waste money on the cloud?'"

Our qualitative research showed that compliance and control are also strong motivators behind the retention of the traditional data centre. These issues remain pertinent and - particularly given the impending EU GDPR data protection legislation - are likely to become even more so and therefore this situation seems unlikely to change for the time being.

As with our head of IT at the charity earlier, there are some who will just keep running legacy on-premise until end of life, often with very sound financial reasons for doing so. While cloud players make great play of their ability to cut costs, the reality of this promise is highly dependent on the context.

"We looked at what it would cost to use our ERP in AWS versus doing it in-house… and actually the costs are comparable. So unless there's another compelling reason then it's going to stay where it is for the time being," said the head of technology an NGO.

Finally, there's the issue of the general complexity of moving everything over to a new architecture:

"If you have an application that doesn't benefit at all from the flexibility of the system, or if you've got concerns that you're just going to lift and shift… I think you could potentially get into a lot of trouble," added the CIO in healthcare.

Despite these reservations, 71 per cent of organisations told us their cloud use will increase into 2018, with that figure raising into the mid-80s for organisations about 5,000 people, and at the other end of the scale in the 50-99 employee range.

While cloud-only is feasible for only a few organisations, we would expect to see a steadily growing number of organisations adopting cloud-first policies as legacy applications reach the end of life.