More than half of UK IT professionals now trust public cloud services less than two years ago, according to new research by hosting company Leaseweb Global.
The company attributed these issues to issues of transparency, cost, customer service, and the ease of migrating workloads.
500 UK IT professionals with experience with public cloud providers over the past two years participated in the study.
What did the study find?
Regarding migration concerns, a majority (57%) of Leaseweb respondents previously believed that migrating workloads from the public cloud environment was difficult, while nearly half (49%) said they encountered difficulties understanding their use of the cloud costs.
Nevertheless, almost three-quarters (72%) of survey respondents admitted that they had successfully controlled the costs of using the public cloud, while 46% said that they “agreed to some extent”, and almost half (49%) had difficulty accessing public cloud access. public cloud providers. customer service.
The study also showed a shift away from the “cloud first” methodology, where the company puts its focus on cloud-based technology solutions ahead of everyone else.
Between January 2019 and December 2021, 36% of organizations described their approach to IT infrastructure as ‘cloud first’, and only 19% said their organization is officially committed to a ‘cloud only’ approach.
However, since January 2022, ‘cloud first’ commitments have dropped to 31% and the percentage of ‘cloud only’ opters has risen to 25% of respondents.
Despite the growing distrust, the public cloud remains a very popular option among IT professionals.
When asked about the optimal IT infrastructure for their organization, they most often chose a private cloud (23%) and a mixture of local and public clouds (20%).
Only public cloud (17%) and a combination of local and private clouds (14%) came next, with the local cloud being the least popular choice (7%).
In addition, two-thirds (66%) of respondents agreed that the industry would end local infrastructure in the next two years.
But perhaps not only the IT workers themselves are becoming critical of public cloud providers, their practices are increasingly generating the wrath of regulators.
The UK digital watchdog Ofcom is set to launch an investigation into the state of the cloud computing market by examining the market power of major companies such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google and whether this force is having a negative impact on consumer outcomes.
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