Cloud Panacea - Why is it that only 5% of technology workloads currently reside in cloud?

Almost without exception the CIOs I meet tell me one of two things:

“We have a Cloud first strategy”

or

“The business expects me to demonstrate how we are going to get to cloud”

So what are they hoping to achieve from Cloud?

1. They want a cloud delivery model – scale up, scale down, and pay only for what they consume;
2. They want the same or better performance and functionality to what they currently have with their on-premise solution;
3. They want to rid themselves of capital investment costs and reduce operating costs;
4. And they want to pay for all of this by monthly fee without any long term commitments.

Most importantly they want to get away from the business of running IT and instead concentrate on their core business (whatever that may be).

So why is it that only 5% of technology workloads currently reside in cloud?

The answer to that question lies in the cloud offerings that have been available up until now.

Most CIOs would agree that the panacea to this conundrum is SaaS. SaaS is the purist form of cloud. A complete outsourcing model, whereby the business can almost completely abscond itself of the responsibility for technology delivery. They purchase an application and an SLA only.

However, whilst some workloads have moved to SaaS (mostly things such as desktop apps, payroll, and CRM) very few businesses have moved their core financials or systems of record to SaaS. The reason for this is that the richness of functionality is simply not there yet.

The other approach is to move compute and storage workloads to an IaaS model. Whilst the likes of Amazon are mature in this space we are still not seeing a great number of core systems move to this model. This is for two reasons:

1. Concerns regarding the ability of cloud providers to deliver enterprise grade performance for systems of record;
2. Automation of compute and storage offers limited returns as operational effort increases exponentially as we move up the stack. Compute and storage is the lowest denominator.

If we are to deliver on our customer's desire for cloud panacea, we need to offer a complete technology stack delivered through IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, with automation at every layer.

Also, given that most of our customers will be wedded to their systems of record for a number of years yet, we are likely to see coexistence of cloud and on premise for some time. So the ability to lift and shift workloads from on-premise to cloud and back again without redesign/reintegration is a significant advantage.

And of course no-one will complain if they never again have to negotiate a perpetual license contract with ongoing support and maintenance fees.

I'm not aware of too many cloud providers who could claim to address all of these requirements. But I'm pretty sure panacea is within reach.

Chris Marshment is an Enterprise Account Manager for Oracle Corporation. The views and opinions expressed in this article are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Oracle.