The future is looking cloudy for cloud hosting providers, according to a new survey from colocation datacenter provider Asanti of 100 senior IT decision-makers in the UK. The report found that 67% of those surveyed are turning to a hybrid hosting model that includes both on-site resources and cloud services.
A hybrid approach is a marked shift from the purely cloud-based strategy that has marked many business plans in recent years. Almost all of the decision-makers regret the exclusive use of public cloud services. Only 6% said they wouldn't change their cloud-first strategy were they able to go back in time. The other 94% cite aggravating obstacles during and after switching to the cloud that made it not worth the headache.
“With such a high percentage of organizations bringing applications back to on-premise or colocation datacenters, you have to wonder – what exactly were cloud providers promising when they sold these packages? It’s clear now that defaulting to a cloud-first strategy may not be the best approach,” Asanti CEO Stewart Laing explained. “We strongly encourage IT decision makers and business leaders to adopt a business-centric view, focusing on current and future needs to determine the most appropriate hosting model, rather than starting with a predefined solution and attempting to fit the business around it.”
Prioritizing public cloud services for IT needs makes sense at first glance. Cloud computing offers amazing flexibility, and it can scale to match almost any business needs. But, organizing a business around the cloud-first model is a deceptively complex maneuver. Complexity often means an uptick in price, something no business wants to face. Nonetheless, unexpected costs plagued 77% of respondents to the survey.
IT comes home
In fact, 63% claimed the move was even more expensive than their original IT systems and brought up awkward questions of whether the move was worthwhile at all. The IT leaders often had plenty of time to consider their regrets, too, as 98% of the businesses in the survey had issues migrating to the cloud, and 57% said it overran their schedule, another source of higher prices. Cloud infrastructure is also complex enough to cause problems after the migration. The survey found that 44% of respondents had to upskill their staff to handle cloud environments, and 31% struggled with integrating their existing IT systems with the cloud.
That's before even considering issues like compliance and security after switching to the cloud. Hitting regulatory standards was challenging for 62% of those surveyed. Security concerns and needing to match or exceed legal standards has led many businesses to rethink the public cloud as a home for their operations. Facing these challenges, more than a few businesses are now moving their applications back from the public cloud to be on-site or at colocation data centers. Ninety-one percent of the surveyed organizations are moving some or all of their applications in that direction. Whether a company wants more control over infrastructure and performance, has faced too much downtime and underperformance, or just needs to reduce reliance on public cloud providers, the desire to migrate away from public cloud services is nearly universal.
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