The adoption of cloud services is predicted to be the primary driver of U.K. IT market growth as businesses pursue hybrid cloud strategies.
U.K. enterprises are increasingly turning to hybrid cloud strategies as they continue to depend on legacy on-prem IT infrastructure. Business will accelerate more of their IT investments to the cloud, but cloud everything is still a way off, according to a new report from ISG.
“Even if ‘cloud-everything’ is still out of reach for many U.K. enterprises, the momentum is growing, with many companies increasingly migrating more of their IT workloads to the cloud and taking on more complex migration projects,” said Jan Erik Aase, partner and global leader, ISG Provider Lens Research.
The 2021 ISG Provider Lens Public Cloud — Services & Solutions Report says that businesses across the U.K., as elsewhere, have accelerated their move to public cloud services during the pandemic as a result of changing customer buying behavior.
”’Cloud everything’ will be out of reach for some time”
More organizations than ever in the U.K. are cloud-first, and those that aren’t are plotting their IT cloud migration strategies. But the move to the cloud will take time.
“While small businesses can take the natural step of removing depreciated hardware assets and completely moving to the cloud, large organisations, with significant infrastructure investments, may find it difficult to make this move rapidly. As a result, “cloud everything” will be out of reach for some time,” said the report.
The report highlights a burgeoning demand for AI-led cloud managed services among U.K. enterprises, as well as a desire to stay away from vendor lock-in. The complexity of hybrid cloud deployments mean that enterprises need the help from hyperscalers, but want flexibility.
“Managed services are growing in importance as businesses look to multicloud setups to drive their digital transformation journeys. Enterprises do not wish to limit themselves to just one hyperscaler, because each one has particular strengths and different pricing; instead, they are more interested in creating the right partner ecosystem involving several cloud platforms and service providers,” said the report.
That validates the position of newly minted Kyndryl, IBM’s former GTS managed services business. The company, which bills itself as the world’s largest IT infrastructure provider, has recently struck deals with VMware and Microsoft to develop app modernizations and cloud migration strategies for Kyndryl’s customers.
ISG reports that U.K. businesses need help with public cloud orchestration strategies, but have reservations. “Enterprises are also worried about public cloud vendor lock-in and about interoperability between two or more cloud providers,” read the report.
