DEVOPSdigest

Nearly 60% of respondents agree that cloud adoption has improved their organization's agility, but that they could be more agile still, according to The Modernization Minefield, a report from Aptum, a hybrid multi-cloud managed service provider.

The independent research reveals that, despite only 39% of IT professionals being completely satisfied with their rate of cloud transformation, the adoption of practices that lend themselves to cloud native technology and enable agility remains low.

Only 20% … are utilizing DevOps

Only 20% of respondents are utilizing DevOps across all applications, and just 17% use container services to develop and deploy all apps. DevOps and container services increase agility by speeding up application deployment times, improving productivity through continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD), enabling easy and frequent patching, and minimizing production costs.

Respondents recognize many of the benefits of DevOps and container services adoption, with common anticipated benefits from further adoption including:

■ increased operational efficiency (77%)

■ improved responsiveness (59%)

■ improved customer experience (58%)

So, what is stopping organizations from realizing their cloud native potential?

Effectively refactoring applications requires an up-front commitment of resources and investment, including hardware, software, people, and skillsets like DevOps. The alternative of lifting and shifting an application into a cloud environment can often be a more expensive and less successful endeavour and can deter organizations that already have sunk costs.

In fact, findings from a previous report, The Security and Compliance Barricade, found that refactoring legacy applications for cloud infrastructure is a top barrier to cloud transformation (35%), second only to security and compliance (38%).

As a result, for seven out of nine application categories — Human Resources (HR), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), backup, disaster recovery, bespoke applications, development, and operations — on-premises remains the preferred hosting option.

Marvin Sharp, VP Product and Strategy, Aptum explains, "Moving applications from on-premises to the cloud is not a simple case of virtualizing workloads in data center servers as opposed to on-site servers. To see efficient, agile, and profitable results, refactoring applications where appropriate is essential. If you don't modernize applications to make them cloud native, costs can be far more unpredictable.

Sharp continues, "Respondents want to accelerate their cloud deployments, but on-premises still serves a purpose for some and will continue to for the near future. Organizations may already have sunk costs and want to make the most of their current investment, or it's simply not a priority to migrate non-critical applications like CRM to SaaS. That's why a gradual hybrid approach to transformation that aligns with hardware lifecycles, budgets and business goals is crucial."

Methodlogy: Aptum's reports were created from the opinions of 400 senior IT professionals in the US, Canada, and UK across industries in financial services, IT, technology, telecommunications, manufacturing, retail, public and commercial sectors.