The complexity of moving legacy apps remains a huge cloud migration challenge

85% of IT decision makers are planning to increase their IT budgets for 2021, with cloud migration as a priority, a Next Pathway survey reveals. 65% of companies indicate the initiative is a top three area of technology emphasis in 2021. Looking at specific applications, IT decision makers cited migrating their data warehouse to the cloud as the most important.

The key themes revealed in the survey include:

• Cloud migration is a journey – Most companies are in the early stages of moving to the cloud and application migrations to the cloud will be performed over multiple years
• Cloud migration requires careful planning and execution – Companies recognize that moving multiple, complex applications require skilled planning and technical solutions
• The cloud migration services market is expected to grow – Due to lack of skilled internal resources, most companies plan to outsource core cloud migration services

“The research confirms what we are experiencing in the field,” said Chetan Mathur, CEO of Next Pathway. “Companies recognize that it’s critical to migrate their data to the cloud – the study found that close to 80% of companies trust their applications and data on the cloud more than on-prem. But many have yet to begin their migration journey, due to the complexity of moving multiple applications.”

Cloud migration is a journey

The research clearly demonstrates that it’s early days in terms of migration maturity. More than one-third of companies are at the very beginning of their cloud migration journey and need help – in planning their migration strategy, application migration and change management.

Even more telling, the vast majority of companies have yet to take first steps. Less than 18% have begun their first cloud migration project, and less than 13% have begun to migrate any of their applications to the cloud.

Respondents recognize that cloud migration is not a weekend project. 94% agree that migrations to the cloud happen over many months and potentially years. 47% of IT decision makers plan to migrate 11 to 25 legacy warehouses to the cloud in the next 12 months, 27% will migrate 26 to 100, 10% will migrate more than 100, and 16% will migrate less than 10.

Along with data warehouses, the applications that are a priority to migrate to the cloud include BI/analytics tools (24%); transactional applications, such as POS systems (21%); the data lake (10%); and ELT/ETL platforms (10%).

Moving legacy apps to the cloud requires careful planning and execution

When asked ‘What is the greatest challenge when migrating a workload to the cloud?’, the majority stated understanding data lineage in the applications that they want to migrate (36%), followed by moving stored procedures (27%), optimizing code post migration (14%), rewriting/repointing ETLs (11%), and testing downstream reports (11%).

Respondents revealed three additional barriers to moving legacy applications and workloads to the cloud:

• 33% are concerned about how to migrate without disrupting critical business applications
• 22% said they are unsure how to plan their migration or where to start due to application sprawl
• 5% reported they don’t have the internal IT staff to manage the cloud

It is clear from the survey, that companies need technical assistance in helping them move complex applications to the cloud.

Cloud migration services will grow

The IT budgets for cloud migrations are substantial; 45% will spend more than $5 Million on legacy migrations while 30% will spend over $20 million and 10% will spend over $40 million.

Given the volume of applications that are ear-marked for a cloud migration (80% of respondents plan to migrate more than 50 applications in the next 12 months), and the complexity of the migrations, it is expected that the cloud migration services market will grow in 2021.

The most common cloud migration services to be outsourced include: data migration (54%), application support and management (45%) and service management & incident management (47%), workload migration/code translation (42%), and infrastructure management & provisioning (43%).

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