In August 2022, we reviewed the cloud strategies of our clients from the past 18 months.

They can be summed-up in three categories: Allergic, Accepted and Continuum...

1. Cloud Allergic

~15% of the companies have not yet started their cloud journey.

They are either not interested, not aware or not ready.

In most cases, it seems to us that they have chosen to postpone any serious enterprise architecture change because of the many legacy systems they have, often working in siloes.

2. Cloud Accepted

~55 % of the companies see the value in migrating some of their applications to the cloud. But often they see the cloud just as another place to host applications or databases. They usually do not have a clear cloud journey strategy.

3. Cloud Continuum

~30 % of the companies have fully embraced Cloud architectures, including a combination of private, public and hybrid. Amongst those, a minority has also started integrating the edge in the continuum, but none we worked with has done it in production.

Learnings

The speed of Cloud Continuum strategy adoption is a matter of the industry and the value chain in which a company operates.

Of course it also depends on the company's own culture, especially regarding innovation. Companies that are depending a lot on data processing tend obviously to be more advanced int their cloud journey.

The Cloud-Continuum organizations we are working with, use the cloud as a means to accelerate their innovation. For most, their cloud data governance is clearly defined. And almost for all, the system engineers as well as the management think cloud-native for any new project.

Cloud-Continuum companies already see direct benefits like savings, continuous operational improvements and also the possibility to integrate advanced external cloud services.

Edge-to-Cloud seems relatively new and not yet clear when and how it can be implemented. Indeed, such architectures depend on many components that will add new latencies and unexpected behaviors that need to be tackled (e.g. a powerful remote device connected through wifi).

We are currently running a Cloud-Edge-Continuum project where we aim at saving 75 % in data transfer costs running data cleansing, preprocessing and normalization on the edge.

We will report on that project mid 2023.

Cloud-Edge Continuum is an immense place for all possible fast innovations !