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Just about everyone agrees that more application workloads will be moving into the cloud. The only real question now, is to what degree. A survey of 508 IT professionals conducted by Internap (INAP), a provider of managed services, finds that nearly 9 in 10 organizations (88 percent)  who have on-premise data centers today will be moving some of their workloads to the cloud, managed hosting, or colocation environment in the next three years. Despite this, survey respondents said they only expect to see a 38 percent reduction, on average, in on-premise workloads by 2022.

This suggests that in the foreseeable future, IT environments will by definition be hybrid. The survey finds most majority of organizations (69 percent) already deploy workloads on more than one platform. Among those who host in the cloud or with managed hosting providers, only 32 percent exclusively use one type of hosted environment.

 

Most IT teams are displeased with how IT environments need to be managed

Only one in four survey respondents gave themselves an “A” for way they approach infrastructure strategy. The top four reasons cited for not giving themselves an “A” rating are infrastructure not being optimized for applications (42 percent), too much time spent on monitoring (42 percent), lack of skills (31 percent), and lack of budget (31 percent).

A full 59 percent are frustrated with the amount of routine tasks that need to be accomplished, with monitoring (48 percent), operating system maintenance (42 percent), and hardware maintenance (40 percent) ranking highest in terms of time wasted.

Interestingly enough, there is a high correlation between IT organizations that give themselves an “A” for infrastructure strategy and reliance on managed and cloud computing services. A full 71 percent of organizations that gave themselves an A rating also rely on third parties or cloud providers to fully manage their hosted environments. That compares to 62 percent for organizations that gave themselves a “B” rating, and 54 percent that gave themselves a “C” rating.

Those that gave themselves an A rating also have a significantly smaller portion of their workloads running on-premise (30 percent on average) compared to those with a C rating (45 percent). Surprisingly, organizations that only host applications with a single public cloud platform are less likely to give themselves an “A” (18 percent) than those that adopt multi-cloud platform strategies (29 percent).

It also worth noting, 31 percent who have colocation as part of their infrastructure mix gave themselves an “A” rating.

Significant divide between senior IT leaders and other IT professionals

Most senior IT leaders (70 percent) say hybrid and multicloud computing capabilities have made management easier to some extent. Only 15 percent of the non-senior leaders “strongly agree” with the sentiment.

Most IT leaders (72 percent) also feel their in-house IT teams are large enough to successfully execute their IT infrastructure strategy. However, only 10 percent of non-senior infrastructure managers strongly agree. The IT rank and file also note their personal time (non-work hours) is disrupted by work responsibilities related to server and/or cloud infrastructure on average of 6.24 times per month.

Overall, the survey makes two things clear. One is that IT environments are getting more complex. Second, as those IT environments become more complex, organizations that can tap the expertise of an MSP are going to be much happier than those that don’t.

Photo:  Magnus Binnerstam / Shutterstock.


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Mike Vizard

Posted by Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard has covered IT for more than 25 years, and has edited or contributed to a number of tech publications including InfoWorld, eWeek, CRN, Baseline, ComputerWorld, TMCNet, and Digital Review. He currently blogs for IT Business Edge and contributes to CIOinsight, The Channel Insider, Programmableweb and Slashdot. Mike blogs about emerging cloud technology for Smarter MSP.

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