Armed with this information, the CTO went back to his mid-level managers and asked why they claimed to be “doing big things” if there were only three instances running. We looked at their accounts, and came to find out that they were only running three AWS EC2 instances. They discovered mid-level IT managers were telling the CTO that they were “doing big things in the cloud”. They were unable to determine the disconnect, so our team met with the company’s CTO to learn more. Logicworks recently worked with a company experiencing stalled migration projects. “Doing Big Things” in the Cloud: A Real-Life Anecdote Lack of executive leadership results in many interrelated issues that can poison cloud projects. While this may appear straightforward, the dynamics of communication, trust, and levels of technical expertise can cause the relationship between staff and leadership to fail. More than 4 in 5 (84%) of IT professionals say executive leadership doesn’t understand enough about what they do, and 34% say a lack of defined strategy is a top barrier to cloud success. One of the biggest reasons cloud migrations stall or fail is lack of executive strategy and understanding of cloud technology. If you don’t have senior management alignment, you won’t make that change.” – Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS (during AWS re:Invent 2019 keynote)Ĭloud teams want leadership to recognize what they do, understand the cloud, develop strong cloud goals, and invest in successful outcomes. “The first element of any big type of transformation is not technical. #1: Lack of Executive Understanding and Top-Down Strategy In this section, we’ll present recent data pulled from a research report conducted by Wakefield Research of 400 IT decision makers. But suffice it to say that there is an intense desire for more cloud projects but also some significant adoption pain-points that are causing projects to proceed slower than expected.Įvery cloud migration project is unique, but most failed or half-complete migration projects share at least one of the following challenges. Volumes have been written about the current state of cloud adoption. According to the 2020 State of the Cloud Report, organizations are projecting an average 47% increase in cloud spend in the next 12 months, while 56% plan to spend more than they expected due to the ongoing impacts of COVID-19. That said, organizations still plan to invest heavily in cloud - even though their current projects are over-budget. Datacenters are still the core foundation of enterprise IT - and will be for the next 10 years. This explains why the average company has only progressed 20% in their cloud transformation efforts. (Source: Velostrata/Dimensional Research 2017) 62% of companies said their cloud migration project was harder than expected, and 55% went over budget.94% of IT leaders believe their company has significant barriers to implementing their cloud strategy.Only a quarter met their deadlines for such data migrations, with the average data migration taking 12 months. 90% of CIOs have already experienced data migration projects not going as planned due to the complexity of moving from on-premises to the cloud.The following data proves you’re not alone: But at some point during that process, your cloud projects stopped. If you’re like most companies, you began with the goal of migrating the majority of your workloads to the public cloud and perhaps have already migrated your first POC application or group of applications. It is very common for cloud migrations to stall. – Gartner: 4 Trends Impacting Cloud Adoption in 2020 “Through 2022, insufficient cloud skills will delay half of enterprise IT organizations’ migration to the cloud by two years or more.” The State of Cloud Adoption: A 10,000 ft. We’ll rely on real examples of cloud migration projects and the latest research to help get your migration projects back on track. In this short guide, we’ll explore the top reasons cloud migration plans stall and recommend next steps for restarting your cloud migration efforts. Despite their goals to be “cloud first”, many companies are running only a fraction of their application portfolios on the cloud, facing challenges across budget, staffing, and executive buy-in. Companies are investing billions of dollars migrating workloads to the public cloud, yet the vast majority of workloads are still on-premises, with many IT leaders finding their cloud projects stalling after migrating a few workloads.