Cloud adoption accelerates as companies plan for 2nd coronavirus wave

Dive Brief:

Sparked by the coronavirus pandemic, 40% of businesses are accelerating cloud adoption plans, according to a survey of 559 enterprise engineering and IT professionals released Tuesday by MariaDB in partnership with Propeller Insights. Respondents were manager level or higher from the U.S., U.K., France and Germany.
In anticipation of a second wave of COVID-19, expected by three-quarters of respondents, 51% plan to move more applications to the cloud to prepare. Four in 10 respondents expect to be 100% migrated to the cloud.
Not all respondents can accelerate modernization plans. One-quarter of respondents are slowing their cloud adoption because of the pandemic.

Dive Insight:

The impacts of the coronavirus pandemic have a long tail. While 99% of respondents report a current business impact from COVID-19, 84% expect effects to continue into next year.

Some companies are in the position to accelerate transformation, using digital technologies as a defense against business interruption. The pandemic has accelerated modernization plans, and business leaders expect a long-term benefit from the technology agility and new ways of working.

That's assuming companies have the resources to invest in facilitating transformation. With tech budgets cut, priorities shift to what can facilitate cost cuts in the short- and long-term. In some cases, the answer is investing in cloud-based systems, which help shift the corporate cost structure from CapEx to OpEx.

But the cloud requires a close understanding of usage to control cost. Companies are 23% over cloud budget on average and waste 30% of cloud spend, according to a Flexera report.

Cloud benefits are well documented, but organizations remain cautious. With cloud databases, companies are not "all-in" because of security, price and compatibility concerns, according to the MariaDB survey.

Naomi Eide / CIO Dive; Data from MariaDB

Moving to cloud systems requires more than a finger snap or a heel click. Companies have to contend with the underlying, often nested, architecture that requires unraveling to yield progress.

The urgency in light of the pandemic is to create as nimble a technology stack as possible, one that can withstand coming business disruptions.