Research Reveals Cloud Gaining Prominence for IT Transformation

To find out the state of cloud computing and its impact on the IT department, an enterprise cloud company, ServiceNow, conducted a survey of more than 1,800 mid- to senior-level executives. The survey participants belonged to 7 different countries around the world and represented key areas like IT, DevOps and lines-of-business (LOB).

The findings of the study showed that more than half (52 percent) of the respondents are opting for cloud as the platform of choice over on-premises data centres for their new business applications. And in the next two years, this stats is estimated to increase to 77 percent. With more and more companies adopting cloud-first policies, it would be imperative for IT organizations to do some rethinking like evaluating their skillsets, to successfully steer through this new era.

The study has also revealed that the nascent DevOps movement, which is taking initiative in the cloud first ideology, is gaining momentum within the enterprise. Moreover, DevOps is considered as the epitome of the agile development movement which is substantiated by the statistics, where 76 percent of the respondents opined that “DevOps is driving the shift to cloud first”. This data may not be a welcome sign for the IT Teams since cloud initiatives have always fallen under the auspices of the IT department. IT management had assumed that they would be leading the charge in anything and everything related to cloud.

Finally, the research findings pointed out that if IT expects to survive the transition of business processes to the cloud, then it’s high time for it to evolve. 89 percent of the survey participants have already completed the shift to a cloud-first model and they admitted that their present IT staffs lacked the skillsets required to make the shift smooth. However, there is still hope for conventional IT, as 72 percent of those surveyed affirmed that this cloud-first shift, in fact, enhances IT’s relevancy to the business and 68 percent stated that IT will become indispensable in the near future.

The accelerated growth in cloud adoption has been powered by the zeal to transform the line of business processes into digital environments. The LOB leaders have been looking to embrace solutions that can adapt as well as scale on demand. To realize this ambitious goal of digital transformation, IT management must facilitate these tactical decisions of corporate leaders and work in close collaboration with DevOps for optimization of resources needed to drive business efficiency.