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Survey: Migration to the cloud brings unplanned costs and headaches for many

The promise of cloud IT is not as easy to capture as the planning might promise -- higher costs and a lack of skilled IT workers are a big problem.
Written by Tom Foremski, Contributor

IT organizations plan for their cloud migration and hope for cost savings and greater business agility, but once in the cloud, the majority exceed their budgets and discover a serious skill gap, according to a recent survey commissioned by IT services firm Softchoice.

A survey of 250 North American companies found that, after completing cloud migration, 57 percent exceeded their IT budgets and almost 20 percent exceeded their budgets by between 21 percent to 50 percent.

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The results show that expectations for cloud IT are not being reached by IT planners and that they do not understand the ongoing cloud IT costs involved. About 43 percent admitted to having trouble with their cloud management strategy.

Nearly all, 96 percent said they had a skills gap in their organizations regarding cloud IT.

The survey discovered a serious gap in awareness about the shortcomings within their IT organizations, with 61 percent of vice-president and C-level executives believing their move to the cloud has allowed them to achieve their business goals, while 41 percent of lower-level IT execs agreeing the same.

Larger organizations admitted to having the most difficulty in using cloud IT to achieve business goals, while smaller organizations with less than 500 employees reported one-third higher satisfaction with the cloud.

The top five reasons for moving to the cloud were: 78 percent want higher performance from their IT; 67 percent want business agility; 64 percent expect cost savings; 52 percent believe employee productivity will increase; and 49 percent want scalability.

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More than half -- 53 percent -- said they are monitoring application performance. Thirty-six percent have adopted DevOps principles. Thirty-three percent are utilizing machine learning for predictive analytics. Twenty-eight percent have adopted micro services architectures, and 25 percent are using containers.

Human errors (such as not understanding the costs involved in cloud IT) were reported by 25 percent, and 34 percent said they lacked skilled employees. More than 86 percent said they pay a premium for skilled workers, with 37 percent percent paying 20 percent to 50 percent more in wages.

Additional findings from the Softchoice survey can be seen here.

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