One in Three Cloud Migrations Fail Because U.S. Businesses Do Not Make Cloud Part of Their Core Strategy – First Unisys Cloud Success Barometer

More than one-third (37%) of American businesses say they have failed to realize notable benefits from cloud computing, largely because they have not integrated their adoption plan as a core part of their broader business transformation strategy, according to a new study by Unisys Corporation (NYSE: UIS).

The first Unisys Cloud Success Barometer study explored the impact and importance of cloud by surveying 1,000 senior IT and business leaders in 13 countries, including the U.S. Other key U.S. findings included:

• Nearly eight in 10 (77%) of businesses for which cloud was a core part of their strategy saw great or moderate improvements from their cloud migration;
• Less than one in four (23%) for which cloud was a minor part of the business transformation strategy saw great or moderate improvements from cloud adoption;
• Across all respondents, 34% of business leaders reported being extremely or very concerned about being left behind relative to competitors.

“These results illustrate that cloud transformation is not just an IT issue, it’s a business issue,” said Raj Raman, CTO of Cloud, Unisys. “The question is how to go about adoption. As this research shows, you need to integrate cloud into your overall business strategy, which includes assessing how it can help boost revenue, gain competitive advantage, improve productivity and manage costs. Yet many businesses do not realize that reaping the benefits of cloud requires more than just a ‘lift and shift and you’re done’ approach. You need the right framework in place at the outset, and a continual cadence of innovation and updates over time.”

The Future is Multi-Cloud

Despite nearly all respondents (92%) saying they had migrated to the cloud to some degree, multi-cloud solution adoption is still nascent, with only 26% of respondents saying their organization leveraged a multi-cloud architecture. However, those who utilized multi-cloud said they view the cloud as essential to staying competitive.

• Nearly three in four (68%) said that if they didn’t move to the cloud, they would be somewhat to extremely concerned about a competitor innovating first;
• 74% would be concerned about being outperformed by a competitor;
• 44% would be concerned that they could even be forced to go out of business as a result of not innovating.

“Multi-cloud represents the future of cloud computing, and for obvious reasons. Organizations that adopt multi-cloud strategies can design applications to run across any public cloud platform, expanding their marketplace power,” said Raman. “Additionally, a multi-cloud strategy helps organizations gain greater sovereignty over their data, spread their risk in case of downtime and increase the business’s negotiating leverage – as well as offering cost savings by allowing businesses to shop rates for different service needs from multiple vendors.”

Looking at How Cloud is Meeting Expectations

The first Unisys Cloud Success Barometer surveyed more than 1,000 senior business and IT leaders across 13 countries in August and September 2019. Unisys gauged their attitudes on a wide range of cloud performance issues and created a barometer based on their feedback. The barometer score is calculated based on how well cloud expectations are being met in six areas across business, competitive and IT benefits measured.

Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia Beat the U.S.Brazil is number one when it comes to meeting cloud expectations, followed by Mexico, Colombia and the United States. The U.S. score is at the same level as the global average of 49, which was the second highest of the four regions surveyed. On a scale of zero to 100, with 100 representing that expectations are being exceeded across each performance metric, the U.S. score of 49 is considered a “middling” level of cloud success, suggesting room for cloud growth and the need to better integrate cloud into existing IT infrastructure.

When it came to where cloud was largely falling short, the survey found that organizations most frequently failed to meet expectations related to managing or reducing costs (30% said expectations were somewhat met/below expectation), improved staff productivity (29%) and increased revenue (30%). On the flip side, business leaders reported being most satisfied when it came to security (79% said their expectations were met or exceeded), and being agile to match demand (74% said their expectations were met or exceeded).

Critical Paths to Cloud Success

The survey identified other factors that improved the likelihood of a successful adoption. Nearly four-fifths (78%) of survey participants who plan to spend substantially more on cloud computing in 2020 reported seeing their organizational effectiveness moderately or greatly improve for the better. Additionally, those organizations that used third-party support to help with their cloud adoption were 12% more likely to see moderate or great improvements compared to organizations that handled cloud adoption in-house.

“While no cloud adoption is the same, there are several core building blocks that successful implementations share. First, organizations must do a thorough planning assessment that looks at apps and dependencies, anticipated ROI, staff training needs and security risks, and identify where outside expertise is needed. Next, they need to establish move groups, secure automated landing zones and a continuous integration/continuous delivery framework leveraging microservices, containers and DevOps. Lastly, having a cloud management portal is critical to providing end-to-end visibility for better governance and performance,” said Raman.

Unisys: An Experienced Hand at Original Research on Global Issues

The introduction of the Unisys Cloud Success Barometer – the company’s newest global index – follows on the success of the Unisys Security Index. The company has conducted the Unisys Security Index – the longest-running snapshot of consumer security concerns conducted globally – since 2007 to provide an ongoing, statistically-robust measure of concern about security.

For more results and information on the 2019 Unisys Cloud Success Barometer and to download a report on the survey results, visit www.unisys.com/cloudbarometer.