Many UK firms say they don’t really trust their cloud providers any more
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More than half of UK IT professionals now rely less on public cloud services than they did two years ago, according to new research from hosting company Leaseweb Global.
The company attributed these issues to concerns about transparency, costs, customer service and the ease of migrating workloads.
The survey spoke to 500 UK IT professionals who had experience working with public cloud providers in the past two years.
What has the research yielded?
Turning to migration concerns, the majority (57%) of Leaseweb respondents found it more challenging to migrate workloads from a public cloud environment, while just under half (49%) said they had encountered difficulties in migrating. understand their cloud usage costs.
Despite this, nearly three-quarters (72%) of survey respondents agreed that they were effectively controlling public cloud usage costs, while 46% said they “somewhat agree” and nearly half ( 49%) struggled to get their hands on a public cloud provider. customer service.
The research also revealed a shift away from the “cloud first” methodology, where a company considers cloud-based technology solutions above all others.
From January 2019 to December 2021, 36% of organizations described their approach to IT infrastructure as “cloud first”, while only 19% indicated that their organization was officially committed to a “cloud-only” approach.
However, as of January 2022, ‘cloud first’ commitments had fallen to 31%, with the proportion of those selecting ‘cloud only’ reaching 25% of respondents.
Despite this increasing lack of trust, public cloud remains a very popular option among IT professionals.
When asked about the optimal IT infrastructure for their organization, only private cloud (23%) and a combination of on-premise and public cloud (20%) were the most popular choices among respondents.
These were followed by public cloud only (17%) and a mix of on-premises and private cloud (14%), with on-premises alone being the least popular selection at 7%.
In addition, two-thirds (66%) of respondents agreed that the industry will see the end of on-premise infrastructure in the next two years.
But it may not just be IT workers themselves who are becoming critical of public cloud providers, as their practices are increasingly angering regulators.
UK digital watchdog Ofcom to launch an investigation into the state of the cloud computing market, examining the market power of the largest companies such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google, and whether this power is adversely affecting results for the consumer.
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