Hybrid IT strategies are the new norm, but Irish firms are lagging behind their European counterparts.
The research by IDC Connect on behalf data centre provider Interxion found that 34pc of Irish enterprises have adopted hybrid IT strategies, significantly behind the European average of 45pc.
The study took in 625 IT decision-makers in mid and large-sized organisations, including 56 Irish companies.
The research shows that today’s reality as well as the mid- to long-term future in terms of preferred infrastructure strategies will be hybrid, ie a multi-sourced solution of on-premise data centres and off-premise public and private clouds.
The study found that 71pc of Irish respondents are using data centres and 30pc are using public cloud services, with 51pc of respondents throughout Europe indicating that they expect to move more workloads to public cloud within the next 5 years.
However, on-premise data centres are expected to remain a highly significant component of the way enterprises manage their mission-critical, sensitive data, whether managed internally or by a service provider. This is particularly true in Ireland with 29pc of enterprises stating that data centres will still be their main method of storing critical data going forward to 2016.
Increasing migration to the cloud
Pictured: Interxion Ireland managing director Tanya Duncan
The research also shows that high levels of connectivity between these disparate compute resources would be a catalyst for further migration to the cloud.
The key barriers to further cloud adoption by enterprises are concerns about security (58pc in Ireland) followed by data protection and company rules both at 25pc for Irish enterprises. Interestingly, respondents replied that they would nearly double the workloads run in the cloud, an increase from 24pc to 42pc, if these challenges were overcome.
Already, 37pc of Irish respondents intend to bypass the Internet and opt for enterprise-grade solutions, connecting to the cloud via a WAN connection or direct connect solution.
“This research demonstrates that while Irish enterprises are more reluctant than our EU counterparts to migrate to public cloud storage, developments around data security and application performance will see this number increase,” said Tanya Duncan, managing director of Interxion Ireland.
“The number of enterprises using direct connect services will further accelerate cloud adoption. All of this only confirms that the new IT reality is hybrid.”
Data centre image via Shutterstock
