ANZ enterprises are going multicloud

Businesses in Australia and New Zealand are eager to fast track their migrations to the public cloud—catching up with other major markets—but many prefer a hybrid cloud environment over a single public or private cloud, according to a new report published today by Information Services Group (ISG), a global technology research and advisory firm.

The ISG Provider Lens Cloud Transformation/Operation Services & XaaS Report for Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) finds companies in the two countries often embracing a multicloud strategy. ISG said they tend to use several cloud providers for different services. Most managed service providers (MSPs) in the region are acting as "cloud brokers," helping customers navigate various cloud options and migrate existing workloads to multiple cloud environments, the report said.

"Almost all service providers have developed their own version of a platform that offers a one-stop shop for rapid, secure and efficient enterprise application cloud migration that supports multiple clouds," said Lisa Borden, Partner and head of ISG Australia-New Zealand.

VMware vSphere and the Microsoft Azure Stack are among the favourite vendors, the report said. However, many businesses in the region still need to be educated about the technology advances available through the cloud, according to the report.

The report also found many businesses in Australia and New Zealand have not made the DevOps approach to application development a priority thus far. In the public sector, restrictive policies by the Australian government have limited the number of cloud vendors that store classified government data, but ISG sees greater opportunities for public agencies to adopt cloud solutions as more vendors with unique offerings enter the market.

The ISG Provider Lens Cloud Transformation/Operation Services & XaaS Report for ANZ evaluates the capabilities of 24 cloud transformation and XaaS providers across three quadrants: public cloud transformation, managed public cloud services and IaaS – enterprise cloud.

DXC and HCL are named Leaders in all three quadrants, while Accenture, Infosys and Wipro are Leaders in two. Vendors named a Leader in one quadrant are Atos, Cognizant, Fujitsu, Rackspace, TCS and Telstra. In addition to Telstra, other ANZ-based providers included in the report are Bulletproof, Datacom, Hostworks, Kloud and Novo IT.

Report highlights include:

ANZ enterprises prefer multicloud environments

ANZ organisations that adopt public cloud are preferring to have a hybrid, multiple cloud setup for their workloads. Service providers are helping clients either with various cloud options through their channels (cloud brokerage) or are helping migrate client’s existing workloads and manage them on multiple cloud environments.

DevOps is unpopular

In the ANZ region, ISG observes that DevOps has not been a priority. DevOps tools such as Jenkins, Docker, Ansible, Chef, Puppet and others were only used in few cases, whereas globally ISG sees increasing demand for DevOps implementations to establish continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/ CD) pipelines.

Rising Microsoft Azure adoption

Quite a few consulting and integration service providers were seen advising their clients to move their workloads to Microsoft Azure, ISG said.

"As ANZ organisations are aligning to a hybrid setup, they are seeing more value in Azure because it provides a reliable platform that facilitates easy movement between a public cloud and on-premise infrastructure. If the organisation is already using Microsoft products, then it becomes easy to move its workloads to a public cloud environment," ISG explained.

Cloud and the Australian government

When dealing with Australian government agencies, service providers are restricted by several policies, ISG noted. This has led to only a few cloud service providers having the privilege to store classified government data.

"In the coming years, ISG expects more cloud service providers will enter the market with unique automated and orchestrated solutions, which will create more opportunities for government agencies to adopt cloud solutions," ISG said.

ANZ organisations need to overhaul their IT architectures

ANZ enterprises still need to be educated about the technology advances. Service providers see that most of the migrations are "lift-and-shift", rather than refactoring or rearchitecting the application which would optimise it for the new environment.

"Although service providers bring their automation skills to migrate the workloads to the public cloud, they typically only manage to move the applications swiftly. Enterprise IT teams need to change their mindset about the cloud, which offers a lot more than just scalability and agility, in addition to monitoring and protecting information on a cloud environment. Many small and medium businesses struggle to raise capital for technology investments, so a cloud setup would be an appropriate OpEx model for them," ISG said.

Automation strategy is common across service providers

Most service providers have an automation strategy in place that involves developing automation tools either in-house or building upon a third-party framework that is then white-labelled under their infrastructure services.

Cloud migration

Almost all service providers have developed their own version of a platform that offers a one-stop shop for rapid, secure and efficient enterprise application cloud migration that supports multiple clouds.

Details:

The report is available to ISG Insights subscribers. ISG Provider Lens Cloud Transformation/Operation Services & XaaS Report for ANZ is also available for immediate, one-time purchase.