We're ending 2024 on a somewhat cloudy outlook for the new year with new research released this month by SolarWinds on attitudes towards cloud infrastructure. Based on a survey of 272 global IT professionals, the research found that less than one in five (18%) of the respondents believe their present cloud infrastructure satisfies their business needs, indicating a large disconnect between expectations and reality when it comes to cloud adoption.

What's more, only a quarter of those surveyed (25%) feel their organisation's approach to the cloud is carefully considered and successful, while 23% admit their hybrid cloud strategy has created an overly complex IT environment. Despite this, less than a quarter (22%) of respondents have invested in external IT services to help with their cloud migration strategy. In fact one in ten (16%) respondents have already repatriated workloads back to on-premises, while nearly half (46%) of the IT pros surveyed are still storing their most sensitive data on-premises due to persistent security worries.

"The truth is, managing complex hybrid-cloud ecosystems isn't easy. While the cloud promises scalability and cost savings, the gap between expectation and execution is becoming increasingly evident," commented Sascha Giese, Global Tech Evangelist at SolarWinds. "In this landscape, many businesses find themselves grappling with overly complex infrastructures that struggle to meet evolving needs ... One key advantage businesses can leverage to successfully manage their hybrid cloud infrastructures is comprehensive observability. That means gaining real-time visibility into every layer of the IT estate and acting proactively with the assistance of machine learning algorithms and AI-driven analytics. Cloud infrastructure can be a powerful growth enabler, but with a mess of mismatched tools and poor visibility, it will be a bumpy ride." Perhaps now's the ideal time to review our cloud forecasts for 2025...

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