Australia leads world on cloud and DevOps, survey suggests

Australian businesses are ahead of their global counterparts when it comes to cloud adoption and DevOps, a survey suggests.

When it came to choosing a platform for new business applications, 69 per cent of local respondents said they would choose cloud-based software-as-a-service or platform-as-a-service over on-premise data centres, compared to 52 per cent globally.

The ServiceNow commissioned global study of 1,850 senior managers at large organisations, also found that slightly more Australian IT managers reported they were involved in DevOps than the global average (96 per cent compared to 94 per cent globally).

More than 80 per cent of Australian respondents claimed the rise of DevOps was a major factor driving the move to a cloud-first approach, compared to 76 per cent globally.

Ominous signs

David Oakley, ServiceNow managing director ANZ said that, nevertheless, the Cloud Computing Tipping Point study “uncovered some ominous signs for IT”.

Almost all Australian companies (98 per cent) who now adopted a cloud-first strategy said their current IT staff now lacked the required skill set.

Some 91 per cent felt cloud could be a replacement for a formal IT department at least some of the time.

“IT has traditionally exercised a great deal of control over the computing environment, allowing them to achieve the goals entrusted to them by the enterprise such as security, compliance, performance and reliability. In an agile, bottom-up cloud deployment world driven by DevOps, such control is difficult to achieve. IT will need to develop strategies to achieve enterprise goals from a position of less control,” Oakley said.

The study also noted that the “cloud-sprawl” made it difficult for IT departments to maintain visibility and predict computing costs.

Some 64 per cent of respondents globally said that the shift to cloud-first will make it more difficult to achieve 360-degree visibility and 63 per cent said predicting the cost of computing will suffer as they become cloud-first.

Raised relevancy

More than half (58 per cent) of those surveyed said the cloud shift raised IT’s relevancy to the business.

“Amidst the cloud-first shift, there are some ominous signs for IT if there’s no change. However we believe this presents a genuine opportunity for visionary IT organisations and teams who can become strategic partners to enterprises during this time of change,” Oakley added.

“For years we’ve talked about an enterprise shift from traditional data centre computing to cloud computing and this research confirms that business reality has caught up. Looking forward, cloud-first consumption will continue to accelerate at a break-neck speed with Australian organisations leading the way globally.”