A Cloud-First Strategy Gains Momentum

New survey data reveal that some of the initial concerns about cloud and on-premises data and app integration, and unifying the user experience, continue to be significant challenges. Yet IT governance and the maturing of managing technology have led to a surprising agreement between the data center jockeys and their business customers.

A Harvard Business Review Analytic Services poll in the fall of 2015, about cloud implementation experiences, yielded 341 respondents from around the world (48% from North America). The vast majority of the respondents were line of business managers; only 16% were from IT. And almost all of the respondents were from large organizations– 83% of respondents work for organizations with at least 500 employees.

Indeed, almost 20 years after salesforce.com launched and a decade of experience with SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, and other cloud based services, public cloud has matured to the point where a majority of respondents said their organizations had adopted a public cloud first strategy for at least some new applications. In fact, only 22% of survey respondents said a cloud-first strategy was unimportant.

They cited all of the usual reasons why their organizations were looking to cloud first – cut IT costs (66%), increase responsiveness of IT (53%), decrease time to market for new initiatives (47%) and reduce apdev cycle times (46%).

And they cited all of the usual types of cloud applications as their preferences – personal productivity tools like email, apdev platforms, analytics, big data, customer relationship management (a.k.a. Salesforce.com). And it will come as no surprise that key mission critical apps like financial records remain least likely to be on the public cloud.

However, there remains one huge concern – cloud security and compliance with regulatory requirements. The majority of respondents appear to be relatively satisfied with the level of security of their cloud apps and data (only 20% were totally freaked out by what their IT departments and XaaS vendors have done). Yet only 42% were highly confident that their hybrid implementations met all security and regulatory requirements.

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Brian

Managing Partner at meshIP, LLC

Brian Byrne is the founder and Managing Partner of Dallas based meshIP, a technology services firm offering cloud computing strategies and services. He is an accomplished executive with senior management experience in all facets of the technology, telecom, cloud computing, and SaaS industries. He has proven success in developing, financing and executing strategic plans as well as launching new ventures. His background includes a record of significant achievement in international business development and his credentials include a MBA in Marketing and Management Strategy from the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, a MS from the School of Computer Science at DePaul University, and a BBA in Finance from the University of Notre Dame.

He is also the inventor of the patented meshDETECT, Secure Prison Cell Phone Solutions.

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