Microsoft recently conducted a survey and found that almost half of its Australian respondents are looking to move their organization into hybrid cloud.
IT leaders are taking firm steps towards transforming their approaches to their organization’s digital transformation requirements. Organizations are transitioning to hybrid cloud with either integrated or non-integrated public or private cloud infrastructure. Forty-nine per cent of IT leaders in the region are prioritizing hybrid cloud over public only or private only cloud solutions for their organizations in the near future.
The following are some key findings in the Microsoft Asia Pacific survey of 1,200 IT leaders across 12 markets to understand how they are evolving their IT infrastructure strategies to meet the needs of a digital business.
The survey found that currently, approximately 40% of respondents in Australia are already on the hybrid cloud journey which is expected to increase to 49% in the next 12 – 18 months. Forty-three per cent are still only using private cloud and 17% are using purely public cloud solutions. The study showed that respondents are not likely to increase their investments in private or public only cloud solutions, reinforcing the demand for a more integrated, hybrid approach.
In an exclusive interview with ZDNet, Mike Heald, hybrid cloud product manager at Microsoft Australia, said that different departments within organizations— such as finance and marketing— are spinning up their own public cloud workloads that are often outside the scope of the IT department. As such, IT leaders are concerned about managing fragmented environments. Heald said,
It’s a tough balancing act for IT to manage both current and future digital needs of the business. The cloud holds rich new applications which will enable better management tools, intelligent applications, and advanced analytics to not just reduce cost and increase efficiency but to also innovate and enable faster time to market. As such, it can’t be ignored but it needs to be managed.
In the Microsoft survey, Australian IT leaders identified skills shortage as a concern. The top three skills needed most within their organizations was said to be security with 63 percent, data analytics on 58 percent, and cloud app management at 50 percent.
Security was also identified as a concern by Australian IT leaders. Local cyber security experts have said the growth of cyber crime in Australia has been exponential.
They also identified that network security staff need to be upgraded, while a new generation of security professionals need to be trained from the ground up.
