The vast majority of Singapore businesses have shifted away from on-premises-only infrastructure to hybrid IT environments, creating new concerns and pressures for IT professionals, according to SolarWinds’ IT Trends Report 2016: The Hybrid IT Evolution.
“The findings of this year’s study paint a clear picture: cloud adoption is nearly ubiquitous, but it’s not now and will not in the foreseeable future be suitable for all workloads, and even if it were, very few if any companies would convert all of their existing applications to run in the cloud,” said Joel Dolisy, CIO, SolarWinds.
“The resulting dynamic—one set of critical on-premises services connected with another set of services in the cloud—is hybrid IT. And at the center of this evolution is the IT professional who needs to ensure always-on performance of applications, devices, networks and systems—regardless of location. They need to be empowered with the support to gain the skills and tools required to properly manage hybrid IT environments, which in turn will allow businesses to truly unlock the potential of the cloud.”
Nearly all (92 percent) of the IT professionals surveyed say adopting cloud technologies is important to their organisations’ long-term business success. Only 43 percent estimate that half or more of their organisations’ total IT infrastructure will be in the cloud within the next 3-5 years.
The study also found that 62 percent say it is unlikely that all of their organisations’ infrastructure will ever be migrated to the cloud. Overall, only 8 percent say their organisations have not migrated any infrastructure to the cloud, compared to 14 percent in 2015.
IT professionals are faced with a dual mandate: increase efficiency through cloud services while also ensuring critical systems, databases and applications are secure.
Hybrid IT benefits
The top three hybrid IT benefits by weighted rank are increased infrastructure flexibility/agility, infrastructure cost-reduction and relieving internal IT personnel of day-to-day management of some infrastructure, respectively.
Seventy-seven percent say that security is the biggest challenge associated with managing current hybrid IT environments. The top three barriers to greater cloud adoption by weighted rank are security/compliance concerns, the need to support legacy systems and convincing business decisions makers of the need and/or benefit, respectively.
Seventy-one percent say they have already migrated applications to the cloud, the top answer, followed by storage (34 percent) and databases (30 percent).
High-priority infrastructure
The top three areas of infrastructure with the highest priority for continued or future migration by weighted rank are applications, storage and databases, respectively.
IT professionals require new skills, tools and resources to successfully drive the hybrid IT migration forward and enable their organisations to better meet business objectives. Only 22 percent are certain their IT organisations currently have adequate resources to manage a hybrid IT environment.
Top skills
The top five skills needed to better manage hybrid IT environments are hybrid IT monitoring/management tools and metrics (63 percent), vendor management (49 percent), distributed architectures (45 percent), application migration (41 percent) and service-oriented architectures (36 percent).
Half of respondents indicated that they have the level of support needed from leadership and the organisation as a whole to develop/improve the skills they feel they need in order to better manage hybrid IT environments.