‘Can do’ attitude of DevOps teams is driving cloud-first strategies

More than half (51%) of financial services businesses in Europe have a strategy to put IT in the cloud wherever possible, and 84% expected to do so within two years, with DevOps teams leading the way.

According to a survey of 102 senior executives by ReRez Research for cloud software supplier ServiceNow, this puts financial services above the average for cloud adoption across all business sectors, which is 77%.

The survey, of 1,850 executives in the US, the UK, Australia, Singapore, Germany, France and the Netherlands, covered the healthcare, manufacturing, professional services and retail sectors, as well as financial services.

Despite the charge to the cloud, there are challenges ahead for companies in all sectors when moving to the cloud, particularly around staffing. Some 89% of companies in all sectors that have completed the shift to a cloud-first model said their current IT staff lacked the required skillsets to be successful in the new cloud world. 

DevOps is driving cloud take-up in financial services, according to 67% of the finance firms questioned in the survey.

“For years, pundits have waited for an enterprise shift from traditional datacentre computing to cloud computing,” said Chris Pope, office of the chief strategy officer at ServiceNow. “Today, reality meets hype in the financial services sector, and cloud-first consumption will accelerate at breakneck speed in the next two years.

“Cloud is not new, so why was 2016 the year that enterprises became cloud-first? According to the survey, the answer is the rise of DevOps. DevOps saw early that cloud computing could solve many of the issues they were grappling with. And DevOps’ ‘can-do’ attitude – enabled by cloud – is extending across the enterprise.” 

Meanwhile, CIOs that are already using the cloud are preparing for a hybrid future. The 2017 Computer Weekly/TechTarget IT Priorities poll revealed that CIOs are preparing the hybrid-readiness of their datacentre facilities.

The research found that connecting on-premise datacentre assets to public cloud resources is a top investment priority for UK and European IT decision makers in 2017.