News

Survey Indicates Cloud Migration Projects Delayed by COVID-19

• By David Ramel
• 06/25/2020

Colt Technology Services published results of a cloud computing survey that measures the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on cloud migration projects, finding that most organizations are reporting delays, but aren't having communication problems.

The connectivity specialist that sells software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN), network function virtualization (NFV) offerings, cloud access products and more conducted the survey about 2020 trends and challenges in order to find out "Is the Cloud Meeting Expectations?"

While primary research for the report was conducted in February before the major disruptions of COVID-19 had spread widely, the company followed up to measure impacts of the pandemic, with questions including "Do you expect COVID-19 to delay your active projects?" and "I am struggling to communicate with colleagues." Basically the answers were "yes" and "no" to those questions, respectively.

"67 percent of respondents stated that they expect delays on their current active projects -- no surprise given the significant change and upheaval faced by all businesses," the report said. "With most having initially planned projects for the next 6-9 months, we expect these to be pushed back to later in the year. Cloud collaboration and productivity applications have seen a massive surge in traffic since lockdowns were put into place, as businesses try to enable remote working without compromising productivity. We asked how people are managing to stay in touch and found that only 15 percent of Insights for Professionals (IFP) survey respondents are having trouble communicating with colleagues -- showing that many are coping well."

Other highlights of the report that was published last month include:

• 59 percent of respondents cited security as their biggest challenge, followed by reliable connectivity and system downtime (48 percent and 43 percent respectively).
• 86 percent of businesses are taking a multi-cloud approach and organizations are also choosing private cloud connectivity with the percentage of companies choosing private WAN (88 percent) closely aligning with the percentage of companies managing multiple clouds.
• 96 percent of respondents are either quietly confident, or fully on board, with moving critical applications to the cloud. In terms of businesses actually placing such capabilities in the cloud, almost half of businesses surveyed (44 percent) have 50-70 percent of their critical processes in the cloud.
• Data management was the primary mission-critical function or system that respondents have migrated to the cloud (84 percent), followed by customer relationship management (63 percent) and enterprise resource planning (57 percent).
• When asked to describe their cloud computing strategy, 47 percent of respondents said hybrid cloud, followed by cloud first (35 percent) and cloud only (15 percent).

The research, conducted earlier this year by the Insights for Professionals Network, studied the views of 255 European respondents working for large enterprises with more than 500 employees, with the respondents all holding senior roles and being responsible for making high level IT or networking decisions.

"Colt has known that a momentous shift towards the cloud has been coming and it’s clear from our research that the cloud is delivering on or exceeding expectations for businesses. This means confidence is high as people look toward their next migration projects -- with most starting in less than nine months," said Keri Gilder, chief commercial officer for the London-based Colt.