Denodo Cloud Survey Finds Organizations Concerned About Managing New Cloud Systems
Complexity of data integration, data accessibility, and accommodating different data formats cited as the biggest barriers to becoming data-driven.
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Denodo, a leader in data management, released the findings of its sixth annual cloud usage survey which revealed that cloud adoption is continuing its rapid climb, with more than half (54 percent) of participants stating they are either at an intermediate or advanced level of cloud usage. Cloud-enabled business transformation has become a priority as organizations face global supply chain issues, cybersecurity threats, and geopolitical instability. Although organizations of all sizes and vertical markets are turning to the cloud to ensure flexibility and resilience in the face of these challenges, small to midsize businesses have driven investment in cloud infrastructure services to support workload migration, data storage services, and cloud-native application development.
Cloud-based data warehouses, data lakes, and lakehouses played a prominent role in 2021, and were cited as both a top initiative by respondents (48 percent) and a top use case (57 percent). Hybrid cloud continues to be the deployment model of choice as it has been since the 2020 survey. However, this year, the gap between hybrid cloud and private cloud is dramatically wider. Hybrid cloud was chosen by almost twice as many respondents (37.5 percent) as chose pure public cloud, at 20 percent. This year, it is clear that hybrid cloud is less a choice but a necessity, and indicates that companies are not completely getting rid of their on-premises systems even if they have increased their cloud footprint. Companies have good reasons for using this mixed deployment style, such as regulatory compliance, which may be why they are opting to not simply abandon on-premises systems when the technology landscape changes.
As it relates to these survey respondent companies being data-driven, nearly four in five respondents (79 percent) cited complexity of data integration, data accessibility, and accommodating different data formats as the primary barrier to becoming data-driven, followed by the lack of analytics skills and resources to turn raw data into insights (62 percent). Data scientists struggled as well. Often cited for spending more time finding, accessing, and preparing data than analyzing it, more than two out of five (44 percent) data scientists were unable to find, access, and analyze half or more of their data after adopting cloud technologies and only 17 percent were able to leverage 75 percent or more of their data.
The role of IT in the cloud modernization journey has also changed. In 2020, the focus for tech professionals was choosing the appropriate cloud provider and managing the migration. In 2021, though, these IT teams are more focused on receiving the training needed to take their organization’s cloud systems to the next level (as per 31.3 percent survey respondents), while other activities such as selecting cloud providers and planning for cloud migrations still remain important. Companies are using the cloud for various use cases, with the most popular being reporting and dashboards, and self-service BI and ad hoc analytics. However, respondents anticipate a shift to data virtualization, data preparation, data quality, and data blending in the future.
These use cases paint a vivid portrait of where many organizations are with respect to their cloud journeys. First, they reflect that business stakeholders within organizations are ready to get better use out of their data. Second, they show that organizations are now looking to maximize their cloud systems with robust cloud-based repositories. Having migrated key workloads to the cloud, the next step for many companies is to find a place to store the new data they then begin to acquire. Modern data-management approaches such as logical data fabrics enable organizations to seamlessly accommodate legacy systems so they can work in tandem with cloud systems.
When it comes to choosing cloud service providers, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) continue to dominate the market by a wide margin, but this year, AWS (44.6 percent) has jumped ahead of Azure (26.2 percent) with a substantial lead after Azure has kept just ahead of AWS for two consecutive years. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) came in as a third most-popular option (8 percent), according to the survey. In contrast, Alibaba showed a bump from 1.4 percent in 2021 to 3.6 percent this year.
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