On-Prem Keeps a Foothold in Latest Cisco Networking Trends Study
One-half of IT professionals said the majority of their workloads exist on-premises.
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While keynote conversations across the IT industry may present a picture of mass cloud migration, Cisco’s study painted a picture of nuance.
Thirty-eight percent of NetOps and CloudOps respondents said they think the majority of workloads will stay on-prem in the next two years. This data, coupled with reports of cloud spending decreasing and anecdotes of enterprises leaving the public cloud, led Channel Futures to ask: What is driving many businesses to keep their workloads on-premises?
Raakhee Mistry, senior director of marketing for cloud and compute at Cisco, said the report didn’t examine the reasoning behind the shift. However, she said customer conversations start to pain the picture.
She noted first that 38% represents a decline from 50% on premises today.
“It seems to indicate that cloud is growing as a destination for workloads, but organizations are taking a more holistic view of cloud and on-prem workloads,” Mistry told Channel Futures.
Mistry said varying rationales influence where customers put their workloads.
“This includes the fact that operational model changes take time – it isn’t purely a technology decision, but one of manpower and skills. For certain customers, a major concern is managing security risk in environments where IT has less control. Of course, cost remains a key consideration. It’s clear that we face a very dynamic business landscape and each organizations is looking at their specific needs, making decisions based on what is most important for their business. For Cisco, this means ensuring customers have choice when they are ready for the change and feel supported through the journey,” she said.
Respondents in the 2020 and 2021 reports listed cost and network management as their top concerns when it came to using multiple clouds.
However, this year’s study pointed to a more agile development environment (42%) and security management (41%) as bigger concerns than reducing cloud costs (34%).
“While cost and management will always be part of the network operations equation, there has been a huge shift toward creating new business applications and bringing them to market faster. Factors that impact these business outcomes and experience of the network and the applications now play a greater role in operations,” said Fabio Gori, Cisco’s vice president of networking product and solutions.
When asked about the hybrid cloud networking features and benefits that they demanded most, respondents pointed to the importance of speed. Faster problem resolution scored highest (50%), followed by faster provisioning (48%) and proactive problem detection (44%).
Performance monitoring (42%) and network security (30%) placed fourth and fifth, respectively.
Mistry said customers have always highly valued fast troubleshooting.
“There is a reason ‘mean time to resolution’ is such an important metric. When viewed alongside the increased business relevance of the network, it makes a lot of sense for organizations to place a premium on how quickly they can address a problem or institute a change. The network is even more critical to business outcomes and, as such, there is more emphasis on making sure it performs optimally,” she told Channel Futures.
The majority of respondents (56%) called security their top networking challenge when it comes to managing distributed and hybrid workloads.
That was higher than network performance SLAs (26%) and significantly higher than trafflic flows and dependencies (12%).
The second most cited networking challenge for distributed and hybrid workload was complexity.
Fifty-three percent of respondents called the complexity of end-to-end management their biggest concern.
The authors pointed to the widening diaspora of endpoints, users, and applications, which vary in where they reside, from public cloud to on-premises.
“… most environments will continue to be a mix of public cloud, hosted, private cloud, edge and on-premises environments,” the authors wrote. “For any transaction, each hop in the journey (from cloud to network, user to workload, private cloud to public cloud, cloud microservice to edge microservice) introduces new management, performance and security considerations. Many of these elements are increasingly out of the direct control of the network operations team — even though the user experience is dependent on the end-to-end journey and is still very much the responsibility of IT.”
The report authors stated that they see NetOps and DevOps respondents giving increasingly similar answers.
For example, both groups view security management as their top motivation (42%) to use multiple clouds. The authors added that CloudOps and NetOps respondents generally matched each other within a few points for each question about their cloud strategies.
“Because the two operational units now share common objectives, this is the ideal time to promote greater collaboration and cross-functional priorities. Although there seems to be a great deal of collaboration happening already, it’s not as effective as it could be,” Gori said. “Team members need a common north star to guide them. It’s the role of management to provide this. IT management — from NetOps, CloudOps, DevOps, and SecOps — needs to work together to spell out common priorities, objectives and processes to shape collaboration across their teams in support of shared goals. Platforms, such as those that support an effective cloud operating model, can be invaluable for providing the consistency and guidance to govern these cross-functional efforts.”
The report authors stated that they see NetOps and DevOps respondents giving increasingly similar answers.
For example, both groups view security management as their top motivation (42%) to use multiple clouds. The authors added that CloudOps and NetOps respondents generally matched each other within a few points for each question about their cloud strategies.
“Because the two operational units now share common objectives, this is the ideal time to promote greater collaboration and cross-functional priorities. Although there seems to be a great deal of collaboration happening already, it’s not as effective as it could be,” Gori said. “Team members need a common north star to guide them. It’s the role of management to provide this. IT management — from NetOps, CloudOps, DevOps, and SecOps — needs to work together to spell out common priorities, objectives and processes to shape collaboration across their teams in support of shared goals. Platforms, such as those that support an effective cloud operating model, can be invaluable for providing the consistency and guidance to govern these cross-functional efforts.”
Businesses are migrating more workloads into the cloud, but on-premises remains a strategic modality for many, according to Cisco’s 2023 Global Networking Trends Report.
Cisco on Tuesday unveiled its study, shedding light on IT professionals changing priorities and concerns. Security and complexity emerged as two huge challenges they are facing. Moreover, many of them are adopting multicloud strategies with the goal of making their applications more secure and better managing their security. And to some extent, cloud is not looming as large as it did in previous years when it comes to networking decisions.
The vendor surveyed 2,500 IT decision makers in 13 countries.
Cisco’s Raakhee Mistry
The study also broke down whether businesses are operating their workloads and applications in the cloud or on-premises. The data IT professionals provided might prove surprising. Fifty percent of them said the majority of their workloads exist on-premise.
Raakhee Mistry is the senior director of marketing for cloud and compute at Cisco. Channel Futures posed some questions to her about cloud migration and customer challenges.
Scroll through the seven images above to get details from the 2023 Cisco Global Networking Trends Report.
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