Disaster Recovery Top of Mind Among IT Organizations in Cloud Migration

Disaster recovery (DR) is the No. 1 application that IT organizations plan to migrate to the cloud, followed by file sharing, data backup and data storage.

That’s according to Zetta’s Cloud Adoption in 2017 survey. It was conducted online in March and included organizations in more than 13 industries, ranging in size from less than 50 to more than 1,000 employees.

Mike Grossman, Zetta’s CEO, tells Channel Partners that for solution providers, the survey “showcases the rapid acceleration of cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) and identifies DR as an area where there [are] significant revenue opportunities for the channel.”

“While DR has traditionally been considered to be costly and time-consuming to manage, the cloud is making it more accessible, cost-effective and reliable,” he said. “This presents new opportunities for those solution providers that offer cloud-based DR to meet the growing customer need.”

According to the survey, the top cloud application adoption benefits include the reduction of IT staff burden (61 percent) and reduced maintenance efforts (55 percent). Other factors include scalability (47 percent), more attractive features and functionality (46 percent), and reduced cost (42 percent).

Some 88 percent of organizations are using cloud-based services or applications today, with nearly 60 percent planning to move more applications to the cloud in the next 12 months.{ad}

“What was surprising is that cost was not the primary driver for moving applications to the cloud, as has been frequently reported in the past,” Grossman said. “While cost is still a factor, cloud-based applications have presented increasing value in other core areas which continue to drive cloud migrations for a range of applications across all industries.”

IT pros report using a wide range of cloud-based applications today.  At the top of the list are productivity suites such as Microsoft Office 365, backup, email, file sharing and storage.

But not all applications are considered good candidates for the cloud. Of those applications IT isn’t planning to migrate to the cloud, financial and accounting applications top the list, followed by in-house/custom applications.

Security is cited as the top reason for not migrating applications to the cloud (62 percent), followed by cost (44 percent) and compliance (33 percent).

“The survey results underscore the willingness of IT leaders to move more of their applications to the cloud, including DR, file sharing, data backup and data storage,” Grossman said. “MSPs are in a good position to champion the cloud and drive the migration, leading to incremental subscription revenue. Of course, the challenge for (the) MSP is to make sure they’re aligned with the right cloud application providers.”