The future looks bleak for cloud hosting providers, according to a new survey of 100 senior IT decision makers in the UK from colocation data centre provider Asanti. The report found that 67% of respondents are moving to a hybrid hosting model that includes both on-site resources and cloud services.
A hybrid approach is a clear shift from the purely cloud-based strategy that has characterized many business plans in recent years. Nearly all decision makers regret the exclusive use of public cloud services. Only 6% said they would not change their cloud-first strategy if they could go back in time. The remaining 94% cited obstacles during and after the move to the cloud that made it not worth the headache.
“With such a high percentage of organizations moving applications back to on-premises or colocation data centers, you have to ask yourself – what exactly were cloud providers promising when they sold these packages? It’s now clear that defaulting to a cloud-first strategy is not the best approach,” explained Asanti CEO Stewart Laing. “We strongly encourage IT decision makers and business leaders to take a business-focused view, focusing on current and future needs to determine the most appropriate hosting model, rather than starting with a predefined solution and trying to fit the business around it.”
Prioritizing public cloud services for IT needs seems like a no-brainer at first glance. Cloud computing offers amazing flexibility and can scale to meet almost any business need. But organizing a business around a cloud-first model is a deceptively complex maneuver. Complexity often means a price hike, something no business wants to deal with. Nevertheless, 77% of survey respondents were plagued by unexpected costs.
It comes home
In fact, 63% said the move was even more expensive than their original IT systems, raising uncomfortable questions about whether the move was worth it at all. IT leaders also often had plenty of time to consider their regrets, as 98% of businesses in the survey struggled with their cloud migration and 57% said it went over schedule, another source of higher prices. Cloud infrastructure is also complex enough to cause problems post-migration. The survey found that 44% of respondents had to retrain their staff to handle cloud environments and 31% struggled to integrate their existing IT systems with the cloud.
And that’s without even considering issues like compliance and security after moving to the cloud. Meeting regulatory standards was a challenge for 62% of respondents. Security concerns and the need to meet or exceed regulatory standards have caused many companies to reevaluate the public cloud as the home base for their operations. Faced with these challenges, more than a few companies are now moving their applications back from the public cloud to on-site or colocation data centers. Ninety-one percent of organizations surveyed are moving some or all of their applications in that direction. Whether a company wants more control over infrastructure and performance, has experienced too much downtime and underperformance, or simply wants to be less dependent on public cloud providers, the desire to migrate away from public cloud services is nearly universal.