Enterprise & Service Provider Trends in Cloud Transformation

The Winners, The Losers & The Recommendations

“Every organization is becoming a service provider, creating digital services to better engage with customers, partners and suppliers and compete in the digital economy,” according to a new 451 Research report. “The currency of this economy is software: Every company will need to raise its software IQ to transform successfully.”

In the report, 2019 Trends in Cloud Transformation, the 451 Research analysts dig into the above statements and more, as part of their seven trends happening amidst the move to the cloud, They also offer the recommendations and clear winners and losers for each of the trends. Here is a snapshot of three of the trends they’re seeing:

Trend 1: Optimization as a service will emerge

• The reason: “Enterprises face increasing complexity, which results in spiraling costs and operational challenges,” according to 451 Research.
• Winners include: “managed service providers of third-party or hybrid clouds”
• Losers include: “enterprises that don’t act now”

Trend 2: Focus will shift to cloud-native outcomes delivered as-a-service by intelligent platforms

• The reason: “While most companies making the move to cloud infrastructure are initially happy to lift and shift applications to the cloud, it soon becomes clear that while such an approach reduces infrastructure costs, it is not in itself helping the organization to become more agile and flexible,” according to the analysts. “That requires adopting a more radical migration to software designed for cloud delivery.”
• Losers include: “enterprises that stick with a lift-and-shift to cloud application strategy”

Trend 3: Cloud will work “as advertised” in the era of consumption

• The reason: “Cloud management has become very complicated because of the jumble of clouds, containers and venues,” report the analysts. “Making cloud work ‘as advertised’ to deliver key benefits such as speed and scale is getting harder.
• A recommendation: “Focus on cloud governance and the ongoing optimization of deployments as the real prize in this journey, rather than cloud readiness.”

At Kentik, we licensed this 451 Research report because we’re seeing many of these same trends emerging for enterprises and service providers, and we wanted to share the analysts’ recommendations for success. That’s also why we’re continuously innovating on our modern network analytics platform. It is our goal to support our enterprise and service provider customers throughout their entire cloud transformation (and beyond), providing granular visibility, not just into the cloud, but via the insight and analytics needed to run all networks: old and new; the ones our customers own and the ones they don’t.

More Trends: Read the analysts’ deeper dive and check out all of the other trends, and cloud transformation winners and losers in the 451 Research report here.