Survey: Cloud Migration Has a Ways to Go

Cloud migration and automation company Next Pathway recently unveiled a State of Enterprise Cloud Migrations report, which reveals that large enterprises are under pressure to translate and refactor legacy applications to the public cloud to generate new business.

In the highly competitive public cloud market, cloud companies are fighting to capture new workloads -- with Microsoft in the lead -- says the report. Based on a survey of 1,200 enterprise Information Technology (IT) pros, the Next Pathway survey also reveals that while hybrid and multicloud strategies are of interest to enterprises, most enterprises may be years away from achieving that goal.

Microsoft Currently Has an Edge

The February 2022 survey also reveals a tight race in the battle for market share among the hyperscale public cloud providers. Microsoft had a slight advantage with 37.3% of respondents choosing it as the leader with the most robust platform. But Amazon AWS (32.1%) and Google Cloud Platform (29.7%) also hold a prominent share of mindshare in the public cloud market.

In an interview with Futuriom, Next Pathway CEO Chetan Mathur said that in their work with enterprises, Microsoft is capturing more business.

“Microsoft is the primary cloud target for enterprises migrating workloads,” said Mathur. “The reason is Amazon has more revenue share and because it has focused on the developer community with open-source tooling.”

Mathur said that Next Pathway’s survey research and experience indicates that AWS holds a strong base in the developer community, while Microsoft is gaining more victories among traditional enterprise IT.

Other key data includes:

• 43.1% of enterprises cited a lack of experienced internal skill set to plan and execute the migration
• 52.1% of companies agree that multicloud is a good strategy, but 32.1% are still debating the overall value
• Nearly 50% of the respondents named migrating existing applications as a service they want cloud providers to offer
• Only 30% of companies have a hybrid cloud in production

Hybrid and Multicloud May Be a Slower Grind

With only 30% of respondents saying they have hybrid cloud in production, the shift to hybrid and multicloud deployments may still be in a very early stage.

“I think that there is a high bunch of respondents that really want to go to a hybrid cloud model," said Mathur. “They are in some level of production or evaluating it. That's not surprising to me.”

Mathur said that despite this, he thinks that many large enterprises are still struggling with cloudifying existing legacy apps, let alone moving to multicloud and hybrid cloud architectures. He says he thinks real hybrid growth may be years away.

To help enterprise customers’ move to the cloud, Mathur says his company’s focus is on automation.

“What do the customers want for assistance? Once you get beyond features and functions and price -- people need and want automation," he said. "Trying to do cloud migration 1.0 was a bit of a failure. People tried to do this manually to translate legacy technology. The overwhelming group of respondents want automation."