Many firms expect to migrate to the cloud in full within five years

Cloud adoption is on the rise, but challenges remain.

Today, roughly five percent of organizations have moved their entire IT infrastructure to the cloud. In five years’ time, however, that number is expected to swell to 64 percent. This is according to a new report from cloud management company CloudCheckr.

In its annual Cloud Infrastructure Report, the company says the majority (57 percent) of the organizations it surveyed have more than half of their infrastructure in the cloud today.

However, despite digital transformation advances, the same challenges remain: costly optimization, security issues and automation woes. The report also argues that many organizations lack the necessary internal alignment to assess how well transformation is progressing. Compared to IT professionals, business professionals were almost three times more likely to say they were “very confident” in their organization’s ability to monitor and optimize costs.

“While it’s no surprise to anyone how strong cloud adoption is today, this report shows the tremendous growth ahead and how quickly it will happen over the next half-decade,” said Tim McKinnon, CEO of CloudCheckr. “Now is the time for IT organizations to define the right strategies to utilize the full potential of the cloud and for cloud service providers to enhance their capabilities to lead their customers through cloud transformations.”

Budgeting is a major issue for almost all organizations (93 percent) polled, the report further claims, and the pandemic has only exacerbated the market’s unpredictability. Also, most companies (59 percent) that have adopted a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) have better overall operational efficiency and improved cloud governance.

“Migrating to the cloud is only the first step,” said McKinnon. “It is up to organizations to adopt the right technology and form teams—be it internally or externally—to develop and manage cloud strategy, governance, and best practices.”