Cloud Transition Doesn’t Come Without Some Rain, New Survey Finds

May 11, 2012 Off By David
Grazed from Midsize Insider.  Author: Doug Bonderud.

Read anything about cloud computing, and you’ll get hype–hype if you’re a consumer ("the cloud lets you store photos, talk to anyone, anywhere and there’s never a chance anything could be lost!") and certainly hype if you’re a manager or CEO ("instant ROI, easy to migrate, growing fast!)." But the nitty gritty is just as you’d expect: A cloud transition is difficult, made more so by the "silver bullet" promises many providers offer. That isn’t to say the cloud can’t drive change or significantly shift the way a company does business–it can. Instead, IT admins at midsize business need to articulate their concerns to management higher-ups and know exactly what they’re getting into before signing on with a provider…

We’re in the Money

It doesn’t help the case of midsize business IT pushing for slow, considered movement when companies like Cisco report net profits of $2.2 billion, according to Computer World UK. And they attribute at least part of that growth (up from $1.81 billion last year) to cloud computing.

Here’s the problem, at least for IT: Cisco, like any big tech provider, isn’t just about cloud computing, any more than IBM only makes Lotus Notes or Dell only sells computers. Cisco has also embarked on a cost-reduction strategy to have profit increase faster than sales, for example, and this strategy has already hit the $1 billion mark, a quarter earlier than expected. But the world tech market’s focus on cloud computing often overshadows the other efforts of a company to generate sales and drive profit, leading to the erroneous conclusions that 1) everyone is switching to the cloud right now, and 2) a cloud transition provides instant cost benefits. If it does for the provider, shouldn’t it do the same for the midsize business?

Well, Duh

In an interesting twist of convenient timing, Cisco has just released a survey of over 1300 IT pros detailing their top challenges and priorities when migrating to the cloud, a recent InfoWorld article reports. While the survey does tend to "pump up" services offered by the company conducting it (no surprise here–Cisco says you should upgrade your network before a migration) it also offers a fascinating glimpse into the real problems faced by IT admins when they head cloudward.

First up, the numbers. Only 5% of those surveyed (65 out of 1300, if you’re keeping score) said they’d been able to migrate even half of their applications to the cloud. By 2013, that number, should hit 25%. That’s not exactly speedy. The survey also reported that "more than one-quarter said they could train for a marathon or grow a mullet in a shorter period of time than it would take to migrate their company’s applications to the cloud." Funny, but also telling–moving to the cloud takes work and doesn’t happen in just a week or two.

Why? Because it’s an actual platform-based migration. IT admins know that any such transition is time consuming and difficult, but in many cases, cloud hype has been so overwhelming that management and sometimes IT pros themselves are convinced that moving mission-critical apps to the cloud will be a breeze, even without the benefit of proven best practices and metrics.

The conclusion? Don’t rule out a cloud computing transition, but be prepared to stand up to management when they come looking for instant results. Cloud services offer a significant number of benefits in areas like storage and resource use, but they must be approached in the same way as any other technology migration–slowly at first, and only with greater confidence once shown to be reliable and safe. Caution, not carelessness, is advised in the cloud.