Managed services integral to firms' move to cloud, report suggests

A study from Virtustream and 451 Research suggests that organisations are increasingly looking to managed services as part of their move to cloud, with 71% of organisation indicating that managed services will become a better use of money.

According to the report, 57% of businesses are moving towards a hybrid IT environment as they take advantage of on-premise and cloud services.  Additionally, 72% of those that use public cloud services are using more than one cloud vendor – and 8% use more than three vendors.

The report surmises that as hybrid and multi-cloud becomes the default enterprise IT architecture, new skill sets will be required for architecture applications such as optimised workload migration, integration, and operations. This is where managed and professional services will fill the gaps.

"While enterprise companies are astutely aware of the breadth of cloud options available to them today, they are looking to cloud managed services partners to bridge their own in-house skills and resources gaps, and for access to their deep expertise across cloud assessment, planning, migration and domain experience," comments 451 Research voice of the enterprise research vice president and general manager, Melanie Posey.

The report reflects enterprises' views that roadblocks aren't technical but rather operational; mostly mundane but necessary requirements, like meeting regulatory and security guidelines that are etched in process and paperwork.

The report suggests that cloud migrations introduce new challenges, including different approaches to capacity planning, and new, more diverse cost/consumption scenarios.

Sixty percent of respondents indicated that data protection and security are the most important workload-based IT challenges, followed by governance and compliance management.

"Again, this can be boiled down to a lack of skills and human resources in-house, a need to transform business process as much if not more than IT operations. Managed services providers can help organisations fill these gaps by blending public clouds and hosted private cloud platforms with existing IT operations," states Virtustream.

Virtustream's senior vice president and chief marketing officer Joy Corso adds, "Organisations face a constant challenge to maximise and modernise their IT investments to future-proof their businesses. These new findings from 451 Research underscore the broad benefits enterprises can realise in partnering with a cloud company to orchestrate the cloud migration and management of their mission-critical applications and complex IT environments.

Backup is also a first step into managed services, according to the report. With 41% penetration among organisations using public cloud, mature public cloud users (and digital transformation leaders) are more likely to already have managed services in place, particularly for operational monitoring and management of applications deployed in cloud.

"Public cloud platform expertise remains an acute IT skills gap; the difficulty of attracting/retaining IT personnel in this space is also driving organisations toward managed services providers (MSPs) and professional services firms.