9 out of 10 organizations will take workloads out of business by 2022 and only 1 in 4 IT professionals would give their current business infrastructure strategies an “A”, a new INAP report says.
Why compliance issues are pushing more large companies to the cloud
Cloud migration is accelerating because companies have to deal with compliance, security and control.
If only 25.2% of IT professionals were to give their current corporate infrastructure strategies an “A”, you have an idea of what the other almost 75% think of the setup in which they work, according to a recent INAP report.
It comes down to network performance, the number 1 reason to relocate workloads to colocation facilities or the cloud. (A colocation center is also called a ‘carrier hotel’ and is a data center where equipment, space and bandwidth are available for rental to private customers.)
The popular reason, ‘cost savings’, also plays a role, albeit a smaller one, and in the decision to close facilities on location, it was in fifth place.
INAP interviewed 500 IT professionals in North America with responsibilities for the data center, server and cloud infrastructure and at least 100 employees. The survey focused on the four main reasons for migration outside the company and the results may indicate the death of the data center on location.
“Companies are even more committed to a hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure strategy and predict a significant reduction
footprints of data centers on location
, “said Jennifer Curry, senior vice president of Global Cloud Services at INAP.
SEE: Special report: the decision of the cloud against the data center (free PDF) (TechRepublic Premium)
Almost half of the respondents regret that monitoring of the infrastructure is included in their task responsibilities, and they are not satisfied with the amount of work they take, as they claim it is number 1 for the second consecutive year.
When asked what they would do if routine tasks such as server monitoring and maintenance were removed from their workload last year, they told INAP that the “work-life balance” was being recovered, but this year the response went to third place.
As is often the case, the corporate culture and experience of an employee often correlates directly with how well that company or department is managed. There was a divergent disagreement between senior IT leaders and non-senior infrastructure managers. Speaking of those non-senior infrastructure managers, they were twice as likely to rate their infrastructure strategy as a “C”.
The highest marks were awarded based on four factors
Off-Premit Mitigators: Those who rated “A” have a considerably smaller proportion of the workload on location (on average 30% of the workload), compared to “Cs” and lower (45%). In other words, people with colocation centers rated their infrastructure strategy higher.
Colocation of customers: 31% of IT professionals who have colocation as part of their infrastructure mix give themselves an “A”, six points higher than the total population.
Cloud Diversifiers: Among companies already
in the cloud
, those who only host with public cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, Google) are less likely to give themselves “As” than those who use multicloud platform strategies (18% versus 29%).
Super Managed Services users: The more companies depend on third parties or cloud providers to fully manage their hosted environments (up to the application layer), the greater the chance that they will assign an “A” to their infrastructure strategy. The average share of fully managed workloads: “As”, 71%; “Bs” 62%; and “Cs” 54%.
Reasons for low infrastructure scores
- The infrastructure that we use is not fully optimized for our applications, 42%
- We spend too much time on managing and maintaining the infrastructure, 42%
- We generally miss the people or skills needed to get the most out of our infrastructure strategy, 31%
- In general our budget does not support an optimal infrastructure strategy, 31%
- Our network performance is slow or unreliable than it could be, 28%
- The infrastructure that we use is not reliable or superfluous, which increases the risk of downtime. 25%
- The infrastructure we use is not completely secure / is prone to infringement, 22%
Moving away
Almost nine out of ten organizations with local data centers relocate at least part of their workload
to the cloud,
managed hosting or colocation in the next three years.
Where survey respondents currently host (except SaaS & PaaS)
- Mix of cloud / managed hosting, colocation, on-premise (31%); Only have data centers on location (19%)
- Combination of local and hosted (18%); Combination of colocation and on-premise (12%)
- Only cloud / managed hosting (8%); Combination of cloud / managed hosting and colocation (8%)
- Colocation only 4%
- The future of IT infrastructure is hybrid, according to the report.
- 77% hosted private cloud
- 75% hyper-scale public cloud
- 54% colocation data center
- 32% hosted bare metal or dedicated servers.
“IT professionals believe more and more that their value for the organization is higher if they spend less time on infrastructure maintenance related activities,” Curry added. “When asked what they would focus on with hypothetical time in their work weeks, a higher concentration of selected activities revolved around improving the product and application layer of their infrastructure stack. Moreover, we saw a significantly larger number of organizations that considered colocation as part of their infrastructure mix alongside private cloud and the most important public cloud IaaS platforms. ”
The following are the given reasons for the switch to cloud and colo, from the most reactions to the least:
- Improve network performance
- Improve the scalability of infrastructure and applications
- Improve resilience / availability of infrastructure or data center (eg, deploy new environments for disaster recovery, achieve higher uptime)
- Improve the security of infrastructure or data centers
- Reduce costs / on-premise data centers too expensive
- Shifting IT strategy from capital expenditure (owner of infrastructure) to operational expenditure
- Eliminate compliance concerns about on-site data center / infrastructure
- Newly implemented applications perform better in a hosted or cloud environment
- Refactoring of existing applications for performance and efficiency
- Staff / management skills shortages
- Limitations staff / management resources
A phone call away
It’s always on, so IT infrastructure management is a 24/7 / 365-day task and IT professionals report that they are interrupted 6.24 times a month, during personal time or non-working hours.
The four main reasons for stimulating migration outside the company
- Improve network performance
- Scalability of applications
- Resilience
- Infrastructure and data center security
Hybrid
Two in three cloud users implement on more than one platform, further supporting that hybrid IT and multicloud strategies make life easier for IT professionals.
“What we found was that IT leaders are generally satisfied with their strategies, but most agree that there is room for improvement,” said Curry. “Only a small number strongly sense that hybrid and multicloud strategies have made their lives easier.”
Frustrations and the changing role of IT
Some, 39% (the largest group), somewhat agree that they are frustrated by the amount of time they take due to routine tasks and busy work.
The majority, 46%, also somewhat agree that they can bring more value to their organization if they spend less time on routine tasks such as server monitoring and maintenance.
The majority of the interviewed professionals, 72%, say that their workforce is sufficient and large enough to implement the company’s IT infrastructure (but only 10% of non-seniors agree). This was surprising for INAP, “IT teams don’t think that more staff throwing something at the issue solves something. To me, this reiterates that frustrations are about role – not about ability,” Curry said.
The top infrastructure activity (last year also number 1) with which IT professionals (48%) agree that they spend too much time on is monitoring. Maintenance of operating system and hardware comes in second place (42%) and third place (40%).
“Infrastructure monitoring remains the most disgusting time magnet of IT,” said Curry. “In general, we see teams spending too much energy on routine activities and maintenance and looking for new solutions and partners to relieve those responsibilities. This allows internal experts to focus on value-added activities.”
Those extra hours
Respondents were asked to divide their time over a series of activities if 16 hours of their time was hypothetically returned, or the unrealized benefits of an IT department. The best response was to develop / innovate new applications and / or products, followed by restoring a balance between work and private life and improving existing applications.
“To make infrastructure strategies truly top marks in the hybrid and multicloud era, companies need to do two things, according to the results of our survey,” said Curry.
“First, they need to ensure that each platform is optimized for the unique needs of their workloads. In other words, do not go all-in on one solution or cloud if this is detrimental to the performance of certain applications,” she said.
“Secondly, all that infrastructure across multiple data centers and clouds must be centrally managed, monitored and secured with efficiency. This is not an easy achievement, so my recommendation would be to find partners who understand how to design performance-driven architectures and partners that you Provide the flexibility and support needed to give your teams peace of mind and the ability to focus on what’s most important. ”
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