Deloitte: Shift to cloud services accelerated by COVID-19
A shift to cloud services by organisations around the world will be accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, reports Deloitte.
Highlighted in the report: The future of cloud-enabled work infrastructure is that 87% of global IT decision-makers (polled by Logic Monitor) agree more companies will migrate their work to the cloud causing a decline in on-line premises workloads by 2025.
According to the report, despite the economic recession triggered by the pandemic, each major public cloud provider posted a continued double-digit growth in 2020 with the highest of 43% for Google Cloud Platform.
Deloitte reports companies worldwide spent US$34.6 billion on cloud services in the second quarter - up roughly 11% from the previous quarter. “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months,” said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft.
COVID-19 has affected work, workforce and workplace in dramatic ways and forced organisations to think about their future infrastructure needs and accelerate their movement to the cloud, outlines the insights paper.
“We expect to see a shift in cloud strategies toward cloud migration, security, operations, value planning, and DevSecOps (short for development, security, and operations) as well as a retraction of cloud native, container and serverless initiatives,” says the report.
Statistics before and during the global pandemic shows a steep uptick in organisations looking to public clouds:
- Cloud demand
Before; 20% of enterprises expected half of their workload to be in a public cloud by 12 months.
During; 59% expect cloud use to exceed plans – queries for senior cloud executives has increased by 224%.
- Remote working
Before; 3% of employees reportedly worked remotely in January 2020.
During; 64% of full-time employees worked remotely as of April 2020 and 81% of the global workforce (2.7 billion workers) was impacted by lockdown as of May 2020.
- Collaboration tools
Before; 20 million Microsoft Teams daily active users in November 2019.
After: 75 million (almost quadrupled) Microsoft Teams daily active users by May 2020.
- Infrastructure requirement
Before: 17% desktop users and 15% mobile users accessed VPN IN December 2019.
During: Microsoft Azure VPN grew by 94%
- Cloud revenues:
Before: Cloud market leaders experienced growth in 2019 – 37% for Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Q2 2019 and 22% growth in Microsoft Intelligent Cloud in Q3 2019.
During: Despite the economic recession, each major public cloud provider posted a continued double-digit growth in 2020 the highest of 43% for Google Cloud Platform, 29% for Amazon Web Services and 27% for Microsoft Intelligent Cloud.
Surge in demand for services
“With most of the global workforce remote, major public cloud providers witnessed a huge surge in demand for their services. Such volumes stressed traditional infrastructure (such as virtual private networks) and forced organisations to lift and shift to the cloud quickly, leaving room for further optimisation,” report Deloitte.
Stay-at-home orders made it difficult, if not impossible, to access on-premise infrastructure highlighting a key infrastructure risk. The vulnerability of tightly interlocked business and technology architectures to stress has become apparent.
As organisations respond to COVID-19 with a renewed cloud focus, they face IT complexity, security risk, and operational efficiency challenges,” warns Deloitte. “Resilient leaders and organisations have an opportunity to modernise their technology backbones with scalable cloud infrastructure,”
When designing an approach, Deloitte’s research has shown that the “magic mix” to resolving cloud complexity is having effective tools (34%), approaches (34%), and people (32%).
Deloitte commented that multicloud solutions and hybrid cloud technology strategies are normal for those already in the cloud and will likely continue to see increased adoption as they enable business flexibility.
The next frontier is here
“The next frontier of managing cloud complexity will likely be developing multicloud solutions that use the right combination of tools, software, and technology to manage cloud services and enable business applications - everything from orchestrating data from virtual data centres to implementing AIOps, “ outlines the report.
“These heterogeneous IT infrastructures are seeing shifts in consumption that make cloud a favourable solution.”
Finally, ways of working have been altered in profound ways, prompting organisations to double down on DevOps best practices that increase collaboration and introduce new approaches for a distributed world. Organisations can look to double down on agile development, embrace ChatOps for virtual collaboration, automate DevOps processes that continue to shift left, and step into new roles to support an IT-as-a-service operating model.
“This combination of multicloud solutions, federated security, and distributed DevOps can help create a future of cloud-enabled work infrastructure needed to make virtual business infrastructure work, concludes the report.
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