Azure - the number one choice for organisations moving to the cloud

Microsoft Azure has become the number one choice for organisations migrating their mission critical IT environments to the cloud.

The facts:

According to a recent independent industry study, almost 75% of businesses are planning to take the leap and transition their additional systems to the cloud in 2016.

The study was based on responses from 500 high level business executives within UK and US organisations, and from the results it was quite conclusive that Microsoft Azure was the number one choice when migrating to the cloud.

From the entire scope of people asked, 32% of them said that they were currently in the planning stages of moving their mission critical systems to Azure. This was followed closely by VMware Air and Amazon Web Services as the next cloud service providers in line.

Here’s a little food for thought… when asked: What they were planning to move to the cloud next? Over 64% stated ‘Disaster Recovery’.

Why is this? DR is none critical and a great way to test the cloud, dip your toes in - so to speak.

dsp's view

Business executives don’t seem to have the same security concerns about the cloud as they did two years ago. It's interesting to see that over 45% of those interviewed had already virtualised their mission critical applications and just as significant, 38% of the rest were in the planning stages. The research also stated that the key driver for moving their organisations mission critical environment to the cloud wasn't the ability to enable new revenue streams but to save money on their bottom line.

Eric Chiu, President from HyTrust commented, "What we find in this research is that the challenges are being overcome, and every kind of function in every kind of industry is being migrated."

The participants, all from different industries were also asked if they plan to move additional workloads to the cloud in the next 12 months. From the responses it was found that, financial services, banking, insurance and trading were highest at 82% of doing this. This is backed up by a separate research conducted by Deutsche Bank, where they found that the larger banks of the world are beginning to accept cloud services more willingly and that the industry will adopt this growth more so in 2017.

All this being said, organisations are still sceptical about moving to the cloud. There are still plenty of concerns around how the cloud is going to affect different industries and the data within them. Dsp's pedigree with cloud migration demonstrates how we take organisations through their cloud journey. Firstly by implementing a Hybrid model to their estate and then migrating something relatively none critical to the cloud, such as their DR or Storage. This allows them to test the water before fully committing. Once comfortable, organisations give us the green light to take their entire estate up to the cloud and manage these databases through our continuous maintenance.

We are constantly migrating our customers to the cloud, it’s become part of our DNA. If you feel your organisation is heading towards the cloud, get in touch now and let one of our Microsoft Azure experts walk you through the journey.