Skill challenges remain.
Australia’s cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) market continues to boom with organisations spending $688 million in 2018, a figure expected to reach around $1.2 billion by 2022, according to new research from technology analyst firm Telsyte.
The Telsyte Australian Cloud Market Study 2019 found maturity is rapidly increasing with 84% of organisations having a strategic approach to cloud computing while 24% have mature practices that are able to move workloads from on-premises to cloud.
The strong spending is in line with Australian organisation’s intentions to increase total IT budgets, with an average increase of 6% expected in 2019, up from 4.8% in 2018. The main driver for IT budget growth is digital transformation, of which cloud computing is a key enabling technology.
Among organisations which have adopted cloud computing, 43% planned to increase spend on cloud infrastructure as more experiment with multiple platforms.
According to Telsyte, a multi-cloud approach is dominating, with more than 75% of organisations using more than one platform, and almost half using more than four cloud platforms. The average number of cloud platforms used by organisations reached 3.8 in 2018.
Early concerns about cloud adoption have all but disappeared with few organisations having any cloud restrictions.
Cyber security is both a driver and a challenge for organisations when it comes to cloud, with 40% ranking security as a top reason for adopting cloud-based applications while 42% rate security as a concern with cloud computing, according to Telsyte.
With IaaS being adopted rapidly, Australian enterprises are now deploying a range of applications off premises.
Australian companies see cloud as an important enabler for big data applications, with a majority using some form of cloud storage or compute for their main big data analytics program as massive amounts of data out-grows on premise capabilities.
Adoption of cloud must be supported by skilled professionals however there is still a gap in the market for cloud skills.
Telsyte research found large organisations are looking towards partners to manage cloud services with a third currently outsourcing cloud management to third parties. Local data centres remain important too, with nearly one-third of IT and business leaders being more willing to try cloud services from multinational organisations if they have local data centres.
A significant number still have restrictions in adopting off-shore public cloud services, with the majority citing internal company policies as the main limitation.