How To Manage The Prime Complexities & Barriers To Cloud Adoption

Why Smooth Cloud Transition Still Remains an Oblivious Concept for Businesses, Especially SMBs & How to Deal with It

The rate of adoption of cloud by the organizations is pretty impressive.

In fact, a report by Gartner infers that the worldwide public cloud revenue will surge to $331 billion by the year 2022, almost doubling the 2018 revenue of $182 billion.

Many businesses are realizing that cloud isn’t all they dreamt of it to be and have started repatriating workloads back on-premises.

A study by Mckinsey revealed that roughly 50% of their workloads are running in the public cloud today and 75% of their workloads will be running in the cloud by the year 2022.

The report clearly shows that companies are rapidly increasing their utilization of the public cloud.

However, the same report also establishes that 80% of the CIOs are yet to reach the level of agility and business benefits that they were aiming for.

Some of the organizations that have adopted cloud and transitioned a majority of workloads are still having the same levels of agility as their counterparts who are slowly making the move.

The diminished cloud agility is indeed a limiting factor for companies that have adopted the cloud. So, why companies are increasing the utilization of the cloud despite the fact that most of them haven't yet achieved the requisite agility range?

To avoid this overwhelming situation, companies, especially SMBs need to realize that while embracing cloud as a solution is inevitable, they need to avoid the common pitfalls to prevent the cloud catastrophe. The barriers to cloud agility need to be understood. These might not often be too obvious and they need to be addressed effectively before they happen:

Limiting Factor #1 – Lack of Knowledge – The top reason for companies failing to achieve cloud agility is a wide skill margin and talent gaps that exist in technical and managerial staff.

The lack of investment in proper skills development, and filling the skill gap with talent from outside of your organization remain the most common challenges to embracing cloud agility.

A recent study by OpsRamp found that 94% of the IT decision-makers find it difficult to hire Dev Ops/SRE professionals, multi-cloud operators, or cloud-native developers. The study also revealed that that 45% of all hiring managers are unable to fill these critical positions because there's a shortage of qualified talent.

If one can’t find the right talent to implement and manage the public cloud, the next best solution remains to upskill one’s staff.  Instead of choosing to outsource the migration, companies need to take some time out to upskill their staff. This cuts down the dependency on an outside agency and allows an organization to manage and support its own cloud. Also, the knowledge gap that existed is streamlined.

Limiting Factor #2 Challenges Related to Security & Compliance - The cloud agility goals of the organizations can also be disturbed because of security and compliance challenges that plunge along.

According to a study by McKinsey 52% of CIOs have failed to reach their cloud agility objectives because of security and compliance challenges. All companies need to have the right security strategies in place.

Security and compliance challenges fall into one of the following categories:

a)  When a Company Tries to Replicate Its Current Security Practices to Cloud - Most of such companies assume that their on-premises security tools are going to be cloud-competent, and in most of the instances they aren't. Companies must adopt cloud-based security and advanced compliance solutions. Embracing the in-built security and compliance tools that are continually being improved, might be a good idea.

b)  Lack of Knowledge to Leverage Advanced Cloud-Based Security Tools – Learning how to run applications in the cloud requires training, testing, time to ramp up. Similarly, learning how to run applications securely in the cloud also requires training, testing, and ramp-up time.

Companies must ensure that their teams have the right technologies & enough time to implement cloud-native security, compliance, and other infrastructure tools.

Limiting Factor #3 Implementation Complexities – Implementation complexities and change management are among the leading causes of an organization’s failure to reach cloud agility. Organizations need to spend time understanding their applications and reduce that complexity as much as possible before moving those applications to the cloud.

Wrap Up

The above-listed barriers to cloud agility are the most overwhelming limiting factors to the adoption of cloud by companies in an era where cloud is inevitable, especially for SMBs. The solution lies in doing the following things correctly:

• Skilling everyone up on the cloud-native mindset
• Taking time to understand applications and unravel their complexities
• Restraining the complexities from getting replicated in the cloud
• Ensuring migration only when staff is ready which might sometimes take longer than the business wants
• Continuing learning and upskilling

All the companies planning to move to the cloud, including the SMBs must understand that embracing the latest technical skills lies at the core of making cloud agility a reality.

Hope the above tips help your organization be cloud-ready as you overcome the prime barriers aligned with cloud adoption.