Cloud Adoption in 2020: Security Still A Big Gap Partners Can Fill

A distinct majority of organizations look at cloud security as a skill they need to add or reinforce — especially as one in four respondents said their companies plan to move all applications into the cloud in the next year. That’s according to a new report, “Cloud Adoption in 2020,” from technology and business learning firm O’Reilly.

When it comes to building cloud security expertise, though, most IT departments have obstacles. They face budget, staff and time constraints. That has grown particularly true during COVID-19, even though O’Reilly carried out its research prior to the pandemic. And while the report did not explicitly address the channel, it is clear that partners can (and should) step in to provide what enterprises need to help them mitigate risk.

Consider this: Two in three (65%) respondents consider cloud security the most important skill for migrating or implementing cloud infrastructure. Monitoring followed at 58%, with general cloud knowledge coming in third at 56%.

“Clearly, respondents believe that they – along with other infrastructure and ops practitioners – need to skill up, with emphasis on security,” wrote report authors Roger Magoulas and Steve Swoyer.

The demand for such proficiency looks to only increase. For example, “Cloud Adoption in 2020” notes that more than 88% of respondents use cloud infrastructure in some form. Forty-five percent expect to move three-quarters or more of their applications to the cloud over the next 12 months. All that activity means someone needs to shore up gaps in cloud security, and partners stand out as obvious solutions.

In terms of other notable findings, analysts discovered that 21% of organizations host all applications in a cloud context. Meantime, while nearly half (49%) of organizations run applications in traditional, on-premises contexts, 39% use a combination of public and private cloud deployments in a hybrid-cloud alternative. Finally, just more than half – 54% – rely on multiple cloud services, O’Reilly found.

AWS Still King

To wit, it comes as little surprise that public cloud continues to dominate in terms of cloud deployment options. And Amazon Web Services still leads the pack — in the O’Reilly report, to the tune of 67%.

“Cloud Adoption in 2020” results track with previous other research trends; O’Reilly shows Microsoft Azure adoption trailing at 48%, and Google Cloud Platform coming in third at 32%. Interestingly, O’Reilly said that while Azure and Google Cloud customers also report using AWS, the reverse is not necessarily true.

“Among respondents who use only public cloud providers, AWS’ share was even larger: It accounted for 75% of usage, compared with 52% for Azure and 34% for GCP. In fact, AWS is clearly the backstop vendor: Not only does it have the highest share among respondent organizations, but – of the 54% who use at least two cloud vendors – almost all of them (93%) list AWS as one of those vendors,” the report notes. “If Microsoft and Google really are coming on strong, they aren’t dislodging Amazon and AWS. If anything, organizations seem to be pursuing multicloud strategies — even if they aren’t explicitly ‘doing’ multicloud. Among our survey respondents, multicloud effectively means AWS plus another cloud service.”

COVID-19

For the “Cloud Adoption in 2020“ report, O’Reilly conducted an in-depth survey of almost 1,300 technology professionals worldwide before the COVID-19 pandemic hit hard in March and April. Analysts addressed that gap in the conclusion to the report. If anything, they – along with other industry researchers – expect cloud to …

… withstand the economic headwinds that have come with lockdowns and shelter-in-place orders, in large part because of mass shifts to remote work.

“There’s no reason to assume the underlying trends here will be annulled by the effects of COVID-19,” the authors wrote. “Impacted, yes; annulled, no. The shift to cloud, uptake of microservices, increasing interest in [site reliability engineering], emphasis on Kubernetes, container virtualization and other critical skills: Each of these trends has staying power, especially to the degree that they’re implicated in or correlated to one another.”

In other words, partners, specialize in multiple cloud architecture and infrastructure domains. You have perhaps unprecedented opportunity to augment your businesses. Mary Treseler, vice president of content strategy for O’Reilly, agreed.

“While cloud usage is up, cloud maturity – in terms of companies understanding how to use it most effectively — is still in its early days,” she told Channel Partners. “The move to cloud was initially based on scalability, cost and efficiency. Usage is just the beginning of the story. Managing a cloud investment is vital and has been somewhat overlooked until recent months. Prior to COVID, companies were trying to understand and manage costs incurred by cloud services. [Partners] who help customers manage [all] this will come out on top.”