Why Cloud: UK Cloud Survey 2017

Why Cloud?

Serviceteam IT UK Cloud Snapshot Survey 2017

There are an increasing number of applications being adopted by businesses that are born in the cloud. The research undertaken by Serviceteam IT looked at why companies had adopted Cloud. Across the industry, vendors tend to lead with the message of flexibility and cost savings. Flexibility and scalability of IT resources certainly are considered the largest driving factors why cloud has been adopted within the survey base.

Why use cloud?

55% of respondents to the survey chose Flexibility and scalability of IT resources as one of the reasons why they moved to the cloud. In addition, 48% of respondents highlighted business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities as one of the main reasons why they migrated to the cloud. 46% and 38% of respondents highlighted speed of deployment and increasing computing capacity respectively as factors influencing the move to the cloud. These results therefore support the findings of Accenture in that increasing flexibility and responsiveness can be seen to have a significant influence on the decision to move to the cloud.

The IT Infrastructure Manager from Saunderson House when interviewed commented that:

“moving to a private cloud has increased the flexibility of the company” and why cloud means “upgrading hardware is easier’ and can be done “without bringing the whole environment down”.

This therefore highlights the benefit of flexibility that is provided by the cloud and is one of the driving factors stimulating migration of some services to the cloud.

55% said flexibility & scalability was why they moved to the cloud

Flexibility & scalability of IT resources: 55%

Business continuity & disaster recovery capabilities: 48%

Speed of deployment: 46%

Increasing computing capacity: 38%

Reduced capital expenditure: 32%

System diversification: 14%

Removing economic barriers to business improvement: 5%

Reduce expertise barriers: 10%

Other: 16%

What were the reasons you moved to the cloud?

26% behind German productivity: The UK

0.2% rise in UK services productivity

In March 2017 the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) revealed that the overall cloud adoption rate in the UK now stands at 88%, with 67% of users expecting to increase their adoption of cloud services over the coming year. These figures are borne out by our own research.

There are an increasing number of applications being adopted by business that are born in the cloud and not based on existing applications, but businesses do have many legacy applications that either do not have a cloud delivery option or simply are workloads that are not suited to the cloud. It is now reasonable to say that all businesses are digital businesses as even the local plumber runs a website and does his banking and accounting on line. In larger businesses, IT is now critical for business operations and can give companies a competitive advantage. Whether automating manual tasks, analysing data that was hitherto trapped within disparate data bases or providing more powerful tools to the internal teams, the increase in computing power has had a direct effect on business performance. Some of the many reasons why cloud is so attractive.

However, British businesses need to become more productive through the use of technology, our productivity is currently at 26% behind Germany and even 9% behind Italy according to the Office of National Statistics in Q2 2017. Labour productivity, measured as output per hour, fell by 0.1 per cent in the second quarter of this year (2017), from the first. On the plus side, services productivity rose by 0.2 per cent.

How satisfied are cloud users?

On average respondents were 70% satisfied that they were able to achieve all that they wanted to in moving to the cloud. The result of this question did however vary between sectors sampled in the survey. Respondents from the insurance sector were 79% satisfied whilst those from marketing and advertising companies were only 47% satisfied on average that they were able to achieve their objectives. These results therefore demonstrate the diversity of responses between the different industries included in the survey.

When interviewed, one interviewee commented that moving to the cloud:

“solved the immediate issues” and yet brought with it “a steep learning curve and a financial burden”.

This therefore demonstrates that migration to the cloud can bring many advantages for companies but can also create a number of problems. It is for this reason that not all companies are 100% satisfied that they were able to achieve everything they wanted to by moving to the cloud.

70% were satisfied they achieved everything moving to the cloud

Overall satisfaction: 70%

Insurance sector: 79%

Marketing sector: 47%

Scientific Research Sector: 55%

Utilities sector: 72%

Technology sector: 67%

How satisfied are you that you were able to achieve what you wanted?

The cloud clearly wins against traditional computing infrastructure when we look at speed of deployment. It can take over a week to order, rack and configure a server as opposed to 5 minutes to deploy the same compute and storage resource in the cloud. Deploying in the cloud also removes the capital expenditure of new hardware and software. But simply replicating the existing infrastructure in the cloud does not automatically bring savings.

Not all companies were satisfied that they had achieved their stated objectives when they had moved to the cloud as there were a worrying amount of companies across all sectors below 50% satisfaction. One of the largest factors causing this is the lack of strategic thinking behind many of the deployments. Either simply moving workloads or small projects scaling up unpredictably. With the benefits of cloud comes the requirements of new ways of thinking and operating for the IT departments and some are yet to fully make the transition, and continue to ask “Why Cloud”.

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Analysis, Results & Sectors