The past
Cloud migration projects in the past decade raised certain doubts for IT managers, which were usually justified by the following patterns
- Lack of maturity of the technology provided by public cloud service platforms.
- Loss of control of IT infrastructure and systems
- Low specialization of technical staff in cloud technology knowledge and procedures.
- Infrastructure and datacenter investment cycles to be amortized
- Highly consolidated and complex IT architectures to align with cloud solutions
- Offshoring of data and potential obstacles to comply with administrative regulations (especially in some sectors)
- Uncertainty about the evolution of cloud services cost control and lack of information about the third-party software licensing policy.
Added to the above, and as a general cause, there could be distrust in some leaders about whether the necessary investments of public cloud platform providers could blur in the medium-long term and, therefore, the rush to migrate to cloud could involve a round-trip project.
The present
At present, the evolution of the cloud market in Spain is expected to grow in double digits (at a lower rate than in the European Union as a whole) and driven in some sectors by funding from European recovery and resilience funds.
On the other hand, and from the point of view of public cloud providers, their current evolution can be summarized as follows:
- Decrease in the concentration of suppliers with the development of new generalist and specialized players in SaaS solutions.
- Extension of services to areas other than the traditional infrastructure areas and reaching all of them? the needs of current and planned IT loads (data analytics and artificial intelligence, digital transformation, internet of things, etc.)
- New specific technologies for the governance of hybrid models: on-premises and cloud and for the management of multi-cloud solutions.
- Emergence of licensing and service cost alternatives and technologies increasingly aligned with system productivity and business impact
- Scalability, contingency recovery and high availability capabilities of cloud platforms and systems that align with the most demanding requirements of mission-critical business systems.
- Deployment of sites and availability zones of the main public cloud platform providers in Spain.
Taking into account the above-mentioned situation in terms of resources and technology, what is preventing the Spanish market from intensifying? The answers projected by the c-level surveys are oriented along two axes. The first, which has been dragging on for years, is the dissatisfaction with the increasing cost of cloud services and platforms, which are forcing continuous life cycles of re-architecture and control and a certain slowdown in increasing new adoptions. The second, with the consensus of the entire market, is the lack of professionals (in number and specialization) to take on the necessary projects.
The future
Full-Cloud is a paradigm generally unquestioned by IT managers in emerging companies in any sector (not only in the technology sector) and that will swing very clearly towards cloud platforms and services in traditional companies for the following reasons:
- The new technological functionalities will be cloud-native and will present latencies for use in on-premises platforms.
- The speed and elasticity of the cloud will make it possible to linearize IT spending to the bottom line, especially for those businesses that are advancing in their digitization.
- The need to reduce carbon footprint and to be able to present themselves in the market as committed to sustainability will force the migration from legacy and proprietary infrastructure environments.
- The burdens associated with data analytics and artificial intelligence, and the necessary user experience, will require platforms for execution and/or distribution of content close to the consumer of the information and that, in an environment of global business operations, will make the management of local data centers unsustainable.