The Cloud-First Approach and the Revolution in IT Infrastructure and Skills
It is now well established, the Cloud First approach is dominant. But be careful, we don’t say that. The numbers, studies, statistics say so. To begin with, we will mention one of international importance and go to the States: according to the
“2022 Technology Spending Intentions Survey”
conducted by TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) division, this year more than 60% of organizations plan to increase their spending on both public Cloud applications and infrastructure services, compared to 47% who plan toSpend more on data center infrastructure.
In addition, 44% of respondents said their company has a cloud-first policy for deploying new applications unless there is a compelling reason to run them on-premises.
Suffice
it to say that the consulting and market research firm Gartner predicts that the inclination towards the Cloud will become much more pronounced in the coming years: it has predicted that more than 85% of companies will adopt a cloud-first approach by 2025.
But you don’t need to go too far. We can remain in Italy where, according to data from the
“Digital Innovation Observatories” of the Politecnico di Milano
, total spending on the Cloud stood at 3.84 billion euros in 2021, up 16% compared to 2020 despite the pandemic. The public and hybrid cloud component is the one that grew the most, reaching 2.39 billion euros, up +19%.
We could name dozens of companies that don’t care if an application runs on-premises or in the cloud. “I don’t care where you put it: in the data center or in the cloud. It’s about providing value… and do it as quickly as possible,” said Matt Postulka, CIO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
But what is a Cloud First approach? What do you mean? It means having designed a precise strategy to exploit the Cloud on a large scale to migrate all, or most, of the applications and core business infrastructure to public, private or hybrid Cloud platforms.
The other news that we can provide with certainty is that there is interest in incentivizing the adoption of the Cloud by 46% of CIOs/CTOs, 27% of IT managers and 10% of CEOs. Because? Clearly it is a choice that has its good reasons.
Starting with the speed of implementation, passing through the scalability of performance and ending with cost control.
Not only companies but also public administrations have now understood the importance of efficient and up-to-date business models. Even in Italy, a country whose administrative machine does not shine for efficiency and modernity, has decided to “devote” itself to the Cloud. The Minister for Technological Innovation and Digital Transition Vittorio Colao presented the “Cloud Italy Strategy”, the guidelines for the implementation and control of cloud services within the Public Administration. The objective of the Strategy is to act as an “implementation methodology” of the “Cloud First” approach for the Public Administration, aimed, that is, at promoting a secure, Cloud native, and complete adoption of Cloud technologies for public administrations. The need for public administrations to adopt a “Cloud First” approach has been discussed for years and (it seems) is slowly becoming a reality. In short, if the Italian public administration, the “oldest” country in Europe, can make it, the hundreds of small, medium and large companies can do it to look at the present as they are already projected into the future.
