CHEQUING OUT
CASTING A CRITICAL EYE OVER CLOUD ADOPTION
Chris Jackson , Chief Product and Technology Officer at Six Degrees , offers his thoughts on cloud strategies and the pressing nature of aligning them with Digital Transformation goals .
The rush to the cloud continues at an unrelenting pace . The public cloud segment of the market alone is expected to grow by over 20 % this year to US $ 679 billion , according to Gartner – more than double the growth rate for the IT industry as a whole . To give this success story some wider context , back in 2010 , the entire worldwide cloud services market was making headlines as it headed for a comparatively small US $ 70 billion in value .
Fast forward to today , and , as Gartner puts it , ‘ cloud has become essentially indispensable .’
Yet , the cloud story has become far more nuanced than just huge growth figures , particularly as the market matures and organisations build their understanding of the different models and service providers .
For example , Gartner also makes the point that the tables are turning for cloud providers as cloud models no longer drive business outcomes , but rather , business outcomes shape cloud models . This is an important observation – not least because it should encourage IT leaders to seek out an approach to cloud implementation that ticks as many performance and financial boxes as possible .
To an extent , this shift in emphasis is driven by the experiences of CIOs and other tech leaders , many of whom haven ’ t seen the full range of benefits promised by the cloud concept translated into real-world efficiencies . Among the more high-profile issues are hidden bandwidth costs and overly complex payment plans , which contributed to a growth in trends such as public cloud repatriation .
In 2023 , for example , issues including high fees for transferring data out , technical restrictions and committed spend discounts imposed by the leading public cloud providers prompted Ofcom to refer the UK cloud market to the Competition and Markets Authority ( CMA ) for further investigation . It forms part of an increasingly complex picture which also shows that even though the public cloud market is still booming , over 70 % of organisations of varying sizes are planning full or partial repatriation of compute resources from the public cloud , according to a 2023 survey by IDC .
The right workloads in the right place
Given these fascinating trends , what are the options for organisations and their technology leaders who want to focus their cloud spend so it aligns with their target business outcomes ?
Cloud has become essentially indispensable . www . intelligentfin . tech
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