Published on the 18/04/2016 | Written by Beverley Head
When IDC quizzed 200 mid-tier organisations in Australia it found that only about 15 per cent were truly optimised for cloud – and few of them are in regional areas…
The poll, carried out at the behest of Oracle, found that about 20 percent were still at the ad hoc stage of giving cloud a go; another 30 percent were “opportunistic” about cloud solutions, using them only when an appropriate project arose; 35 percent were using cloud as part of their portfolio; while 15 percent were “cloud optimised”.
Some of the sluggishness can be attributed to normal cycles of equipment refresh which has led companies to only consider a move when they needed to upgrade systems, but Adam Dodds, IT services and cloud research director for IDC Australia, said that particular cloud challenges emerge in regional organisations where “the challenges bubble up around connectivity.”
“I spoke to a guy in the mining industry. He was still arguing that he had a desire to move to cloud, but was considerably limited by connectivity,” said Dodds.
Oracle cites Sutton Tools, Connexion Media and the Australian Financial Group as key cloud customers in Australia – but all are in, or within cooee of, a major metropolis.
Without connectivity to allow inexpensive access to cloud platforms regional organisations could miss out on cloud benefits which Dodds identified as being revenue improvement, tighter control over operational costs, and faster time to market.
A new study conducted by the University of Melbourne, released today, suggests that the roll out of the NBN could see connected small and medium businesses add as much as $4 billion to the economy thanks to their ability to grow e-commerce and connect to the cloud to drive business efficiency.
At present though, at least in the regions, they don’t have the wherewithal to connect, according to IDC’s research.
Tim Scott, cloud platform sales director for Oracle in Australia, said locally companies had tended to focus initially on software-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service when first leveraging cloud solutions.
Platform-as-a-service had been slower he acknowledged, though Oracle was now working with companies which had first trialled IaaS.
Scott said there had been a tendency among some customers to believe that it was a simple task to “lift and shift” applications onto IaaS clouds. He said that Platform-as-a-Service involved cloud vendors moving “further up the stack” so that they ran the environment, operated and managed systems on behalf of clients, and also played a role in ongoing innovation.
