Enterprise cloud strategy trends for 2021

Cloud computing has become the preferred model for modernizing IT portfolios. Migrating applications to a combination of public and private clouds gives greater business agility. During the pandemic, the increased consumption of cloud services to boost business resiliency and transition to e-commerce models served as perhaps the best validations of the market for software provisioned over the internet. It is considered now that failure to move quickly off of legacy systems and too much focus on migrating low-hanging fruit applications are among the hurdles. Organizations that struggle to move crisply and designate top-notch change management strategies will continue to struggle to generate ROI with the cloud in 2021. Moreover, companies are partnering with cloud vendors and consultants to co-develop capabilities. For instance, Land O’Lakes and FedEx are co-creating products with Microsoft. Сo-innovation between large enterprises and hyper-scale cloud vendors will soar in 2021.

Yet several challenges remain to implement hybrid cloud environments, including the virtual sprawl that accompanies large migrations. When migrating to the cloud, planning and TCO estimation are crucial. Miraworks helps compare on-premise/cloud/hybrid solutions and allows to design and estimate ROI from the start. The financial models of operating cloud environments present unique challenges, too, as IT leaders have found that poor governance can render running cloud software more expensive than operating compute services on premises. And don’t forget the difficulty of keeping up with the latest cloud services and architectures. Even so, the upside of executing a cloud strategy at a high level is too great for most IT leaders to ignore. When businesses lean more heavily on the cloud, outcomes improve: forty-six percent of high adopters report fully achieving their expected cloud benefits.