New report on gaining the ability for cloud agility

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The report highlights that despite significant progress, companies are early in this transition to the cloud and face major challenges, including the need for new cloud skills, concerns about data geo-sovereignty and corporate policy compliance, security and the challenges of implementing a flexible multi-cloud strategy where data can be moved freely to the cloud of choice.

It incorporates in-depth interviews with top IT executives from corporations like Viacom, The Coca Cola Company, DHL, Embraer and others.

Key findings

• A massive shift to hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud architectures is underway at leading corporations worldwide, and IT executives expect the transformation to accelerate.

• A dramatic increase in unstructured data in the cloud is being driven by a new generation of real-time applications and connected devices—and the desire to mine that data to extract greater intelligence and value.

• Enterprises face challenges in cost-efficiently and seamlessly migrating and replicating data across multi-cloud environments, creating potential challenges for big data analytics, application performance, vendor lock-in, and regulatory compliance. 

• IT executives want to improve their ability to move data between cloud platforms without manual reconfiguration in order to access cloud-specific applications and/or capture lower priced cloud services.

• Data replication can be costly and complex and executives are ready to embrace solutions that enable them to improve their technical abilities and economics in this area.

“Most companies are moving to multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments that mix and match private and public clouds with on-premise systems depending on specific needs,” said Dave Murray, head of thought leadership for the BPI Network. “But these mixed models come with challenges. Our study underscores the need for enterprises to improve their agility to move data across clouds to increase cost-efficiencies, drive better data analytics and performance, and ensure compliance.”   

“The findings of this study are consistent with what we are hearing from our customers,” said Dixon Doll, Jr., CEO of DBM Cloud Systems. “Our customers are looking for better Cloud orchestration and Cloud data management solutions; particularly the ability to selectively replicate data to the right Cloud end-points to access desired Cloud applications and services.”

Download the study at http://www.bpinetwork.org/cloud-agility-report