2021 Cloud Forum Survey Results

Dedicated to Gerard Shockley

Formalized Cloud Strategy

Formalized Cloud Strategy 2016-2021

2016

2017

2021

2018

Thoughts on Cloud Strategy

• Cloud Preferred; SaaS first, PaaS second, IaaS third
• Increase our Cloud IQ. Get more experience with enterprise workloads in the cloud to learn more about the benefits and opportunities.
• Multi cloud (Az, AWS, GCP) "where it makes sense".
• We describe our strategy as "cloud opportunistic" - there is no mandate to move anything to the cloud, but we provide support in analysis & design for those interested in utilizing cloud services.
• Multi-Cloud, Extreme Transparency, High Cohesion-Low Coupling, Infrastructure-as-Code wherever/whenever possible

Percentage AWS Usage

Percentage Azure Usage

Percentage Google Cloud Platform Usage

Percentage VMware Cloud on AWS Usage

Percentage Oracle Cloud Usage

Percentage Usage: All other Cloud Service Providers

Cloud Adoption

Age of On-Premise Facilities

Centralization of IT Organization

Fully Centralized ←

→ Completely Decentralized

Trend 2016-2021: Centralization of IT Organization

Fully Centralized

Completely Decentralized

Drivers Moving Participants Toward the Cloud

Reduce Costs

Improved Service

Added Flexibility

Technology Innovation

15

10

5

0

Colors represent weight of response.

Increasing Importance L → R

Drivers Moving Participants Toward the Cloud (Part 2)

​

Outsource Infrastructure

Increase Agility

Improve Support for Research

Compliance & Regulatory

Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity

Colors represent weight of response.

Increasing Importance L → R

Obstacles to Broad Cloud Adoption

Security Concerns

Disaster Recovery Concerns

Service Provider/Reseller

Changing Business Models

Obstacles to Broad Cloud Adoption (Part 2)

Vendor Viability

Staff Readiness

Initial Investment Requirements

Convincing Leadership of the ROI

Other

Other Obstacles to Broad Cloud Adoption

• Culture change
• Human Resource Capacity (we don’t have extra staff to dedicate to cloud - have to keep on-prem working and managed also)
• Perceived costs & lack of understanding of total cost of ownership of on premise computing
• Time investment to learn / fear of the unknown
• Thinking on-prem is cheaper; Distrust Cloud vendor

Container Technology

Serverless Technology

GovCloud for Export of Restricted Data

Internet2 NET+ Enterprise Agreement

Central IT support for Research Computing

Clinical Cloud Research

BAA with Cloud Service Provider

Cloud Machine Learning

Cloud Data Lake

Cost Overruns & Moving Workloads

Validated Cloud Exit Strategy

Thoughts on Exit Strategy

• It's only informal at this point
• One crisis at a time.
• Too busy getting in to think about getting out.
• In progress, but not fully formed.
• We have contractual agreements that define what should and should not happen, but beyond that, our "strategy" relies on hopes and prayers that it doesn't happen, at this point.
• We are trying to put things in containers and Kubernetes whenever possible to help with lock-in, but currently we have a lot of cloud native tools and services that don't allow for this.