Australian organisations are strongly moving in the direction of hybrid Cloud, with a range of businesses already utilising one or two small applications or workloads.
But despite 67 percent of all companies embracing Cloud in the form of either public or private across the country, only 13 percent have an "optimised" Cloud strategy in place.
According to local findings from research analyst firm IDC, Australia is continuing to adopt Cloud solutions with “no bias” towards either public or private Cloud, with many moving in the direction of a hybrid Cloud future.
“The range of solutions and services available that interconnect private and public Clouds as well as bridging between multiple public Clouds has enabled enterprises to adopt solutions based on hybrid Cloud architectures,” IDC Australia senior market analyst, Prabhitha Dcruz, said.
“The increased adoption of Hybrid Cloud to facilitate enterprises' digital transformation agenda will further positively impact the growth of Cloud services in Australia.”
With reference to specific hybrid Cloud adoption characteristics, Dcruz said confusion remains around the exact definition of a hybrid Cloud environment, raising questions of what is needed to be managed.
Depending on specific definitions of a hybrid Cloud, over 50 percent of Australian organisations have already adopted what they consider to be a hybrid Cloud strategy, while close to 80 percent of businesses have some aspirations for a hybrid Cloud environment.
“What is clear from these results is that while some Australian organisations understand that hybrid Clouds are a service delivery architecture, the rest still consider them to be product-focused infrastructure implementations,” Dcruz explained.
Cloud drivers
For many respondents, Dcruz said Cloud is still viewed as a means to reduce IT budgets and remains in the top three drivers for Cloud adoption irrespective of the Cloud delivery model.
“This reflects the lower maturity levels of many organisations,” Dcruz added.
Further, the survey results indicate that public Cloud spending is expected to be essentially flat during the next two years as Australian organisations begin to transition more complex and critical workloads to off-premises Clouds.
Most of the growth is thus expected to be from hosted private Cloud adoption - both on demand and dedicated hosted private Cloud, driven by the accelerating rate of substitution of traditional outsourcing for Cloud based services.
Consequently, traditional outsourcing providers that do not have a strategy to offer Cloud based services are under constant pressure and will need to evolve business models to include Cloud delivery to sustain in a competitive market.
“The challenge for many CIOs as they begin hybrid Cloud implementations is experience and skills,” IDC vice president of cloud services research, Chris Morris, added.
“Hybrid Clouds require expertise that is low in availability and the smart CIO decides on an experienced implementation partner at the beginning of their project.
“Working with a partner at early stages of a project to plan the implementation can minimise risks of project budget and timelines overruns.”
