How ready are you?
The HPE survey also reveals that just 5 percent of companies planning these complex virtualization projects are “fully ready”. But, again, there are some semantics at play here as the research also reveals that 21 percent are “largely ready”.
Chen said that it was hard to process the details. “Looking at the timeline, these are multi-year projects. The very fact that they are talking about strategy implies something that is looking into the future.”
Gogia said that the 5 percent claim depends entirely on how readiness is defined. “If readiness means awareness, then the figure is too low. Most enterprises are aware. If readiness means having a board-approved, risk-modelled, skill-funded, rollback-tested migration factory that can execute at scale without destabilising operations, then single-digit readiness is plausible,” he added.
He set out five conditions for readiness. “First, complete workload discovery and dependency mapping, not partial inventories. Second, financial modelling that compares stay versus diversify scenarios over a multiyear horizon. This will include licensing trajectory and employee cost for migration. Third, companies need a defined target operating model. Then there needs to be alignment of skills, for example, security teams trained on hybrid governance. Finally, there needs to be tested rollback capability.”
One of the main points of the HPE survey is the drive towards a hybrid cloud strategy. But Chen pointed out that, again, the definitions need to be better explained. “How do you define hybrid? It seems to come in many forms, for example, people have a distributed environment. Or there could silos of processes in public cloud, while others are on-prem. I think you have to show more than having assets on both sides. I would prefer hybrid cloud to be something that’s truly integrated.”
One aspect of the HPE survey where there is universal agreement is the 17 percent of respondents who experienced increase in cloud costs. HPE put this down to the growing use of cloud for AI usage. “I think that’s right,” said Chen. “I don’t find that base costs are rising, it’s purely an increase in AI.”
