IT Professionals Are Migrating Critical Apps to the Cloud

An influential IT study has revealed that a large majority of businesses are now migrating their critical applications to the cloud.

The SolarWinds IT Trends Report 2017: Portrait of a Hybrid IT Organization found that 95 per cent of IT professionals say they have migrated their critical applications and IT infrastructure to the cloud in the past 12 months.

The findings of the study are based on a survey conducted by C White Consulting in December 2016, which measured responses from 868 IT practitioners, IT managers and directors from small to large firms who use cloud services to some extent.

Three quarters of respondents said their company have moved applications to the cloud, while half converted to cloud for storage and just over a third shifted their databases.

However, while cloud deployments increased for key applications, the research found that IT budgets were not reflecting the same level of change. In fact, the report found that 69 per cent of respondents spend less than 40 per cent of their annual IT budget on using cloud services.

The Impact of Cloud

Despite the relatively small proportion of budgets being dedicated to cloud, the survey revealed that 59 per cent of those who have used cloud services feel they’re receiving the benefits they expected following implementation, including easy scalability.

Other benefits cited by respondents as having influenced their decision to migrate their applications include potential for return on investment (ROI) or cost efficiency and fast availability of data.

The research also found that the cloud is having an impact on the careers of those working within IT departments, with 62 per cent of those surveyed stating that it has encouraged them to learn new skills while allowing them to maintain their current career path. In fact, more than half stated that their organisation is actively looking or planning to hire IT professionals specifically to manage cloud technologies.

Of the skills being developed by IT professionals to help with cloud implementation, 38 per cent of respondents revealed that monitoring and cloud management tools and metrics were the most important, followed by 34 per cent focusing on automation skills and 33 per cent focusing on application migration skills.

However, the study showed that many respondents were concerned about the IT skills gap being widened by increasing cloud implementation. "Nearly half (46%) do not believe that IT professionals entering the workforce now possess the skills necessary to manage hybrid IT environments," the report stated.

As a result of the findings, the study concluded that IT professionals should prepare for the future by developing a new set of skills resources to ensure their success in an evolving hybrid IT environment.