Infrastructure and platforms are the fundamental building block for digital businesses today making their reliability, stability and business value a key c-suite priority. Uncertainties, on-premises provider risks, and laser focus on value are making more organizations evaluate alternatives to traditional virtual environments.
There is a growing realization that cloud is the engine of modern businesses whether it is developing cloud-native applications, innovating with AI, or modernizing core workloads.
As a result, cloud has become the de facto engine of modern businesses. The European public cloud market is forecast to be worth $175.3Bin 2024 with a 21.5% YoY growth rate over 2023. Public cloud vendors are also cited as the most strategic AI and GenAI technology partners by 41% of European organizations, according to IDC’s April 2024 research.
While most organizations have a cloud adoption strategy, the most successful ones are those that align cloud strategy to business outcomes. For IT and business leaders these key business outcomes are cost optimization, consistent and reliable environment and access to innovation but they have shied away from cloud migration at scale in the past.
This is now changing. New market developments such as VMware acquisition has made more IT and business leaders evaluate their IT environment risks, exposure and budget uncertainties around on-premises environments. This is accelerating their cloud migration and application transformation strategies. Another key driver is how AI has the potential to throw a lifeline towards migration and modernization by its ability to address the significant risks and challenges such as shortage of skills, documenting application estates, generating new code to simplify modernization tasks and so on.
In fact, workload modernization has become a high or top priority for 7 out of every 10 organizations between now and 2026, according to IDC research. In IDC’s opinion, GenAI will reinvent refactoring of legacy apps.
Cloud in all its permutations will continue to play ever greater, and even dominant, role in businesses. Adopting a “wait-and-see” approach or maintaining status quo is a risky strategy. Join IT and business leaders, and IDC and industry experts to discuss the risks and exposure of a status quo infrastructure strategy, the value of cloud migration and some actionable advice on how to execute it.
