Many large organisations are “aggressively” moving virtual infrastructures to the cloud but are not ready to take advantage of the cost-saving benefits, researchers have claimed.
According to analysts at CiRBA, bigger companies are choosing to take an adhoc approach to cloud adoption rather than preparing for migration in advance.
Chuck Tatham, senior vice-president (SVP), operations and business development at CiRBA, said that organisations need to be “increasingly clever about how they use this technology if they want to gain the true benefits from it”.
His comments follow research by the data-centre analytics provider, which showed that less than a fifth of respondents achieved their utilization goals with virtualization, yet intend to use similar approaches when adopting the cloud.
Over three-quarters intend to use cloud-vendor supplied tools and spreadsheets to plan their migration to the cloud while less than half will rely on new solutions to manage these infrastructures, the research revealed.
Mr Tatham said: “Many organisations are comfortable with the technology - it’s just when they ask ‘how we do this en mass?’ that problems arise.”
“There are so many moving parts to adoption that it becomes paralysing. The technical complexity means some organisations are taking up to 60 days to move one set of applications from a physical world to internal cloud. Which means some organisations will never finish the job,” he explained.
Further findings from the study showed that 70 percent of respondents thought moving to a cloud infrastructure would decrease costs with 42 percent citing cost-reduction as the main reason behind moving their applications to the cloud.
However, CiRBA’S SVP said: "When moving infrastructures from virtualisation to internal cloud the savings don’t come quite so easily. Virtualisation provided quick hits in terms of cost savings on hardware - but it’s almost a naive view they hold when moving to internal cloud.”
CiRBA’s study interviewed 94 executives responsible for virtualisation and cloud infrastructure decisions at organisations with more than 25,000 employees.
By Jim Ottewill
