2021 Trends for Enterprise Cloud Adoption

It’s no secret that 2020 was an especially challenging year and, as a recent article in Forbes points out, it’s leading to enterprises accelerating their cloud adoption.

From the article:

Cloud computing has never been more important. It has already enabled companies to continue operating seamlessly when just 10 or 15 years ago, the pandemic could easily have brought business processes and productivity to a halt.

The swift move to working remotely has meant a spike in the number of companies moving to the cloud. In particular, Microsoft and Amazon have mentioned growth in their cloud businesses on their respective earnings calls. Microsoft reported a 27% increase in revenue from its Intelligent Cloud business and that overall revenue attached to the cloud is up by 39%, while AWS reported a 33% growth in sales to break the $10 billion barrier. 

This sprint to adopt the cloud and cloud-based services is not without its hurdles, however. In fact, for many companies, making a massive infrastructure change—particularly during a pandemic—is a recipe for unwelcome disruptions.

As Forbes rightly points out, companies can help mitigate these disruptions by partnering with experts to execute cloud adoption. At Redapt, for example, we have extensive experience migrating organizations to the public cloud—whether it’s a few applications and VMs or hundreds of them—and our cloud architects, engineers, and project managers have a wealth of experience with successful migrations.

This year alone, we’ve worked with a company that had determined it no longer needed to renew its office space lease. While it was easy for this company to flip the switch to remote work when it came to its teams, its datacenter was still an anchor at its office location. 

Read Now: The In-Depth Guide to Adopting and Migrating to the Cloud

Our work involved quickly moving hundreds of servers and applications to the cloud, along with improving the company’s network design to allow for future growth and increased security.

Another company we partnered with needed to provide effective remote work options for its employees. This involved leveraging the public cloud and virtual desktop technology to provide the company with the ability to quickly create remote work capabilities and scale to its thousands of employees globally without having to wait for additional hardware or bandwidth.

These are just two recent examples, and they highlight why, as Forbes points out, enterprises are reacting to the current reality by speeding up their modernization plans. 

Why now and not during more normal times? There are a number of reasons, including:

• Reduced customer interactions due to the pandemic, which allows companies to upgrade critical systems when fewer customers will experience a disruption.
• The need to continue or increase support to customers while allowing for an effective, secure, and safe environment for employees.
• The overall feeling that this year amounts to what is essentially a “free pass” for public companies, which allows them to accelerate their investments in infrastructure that will create operational and competitive advantages sooner rather than later.

Collectively, these and other driving forces are leading to what Forbes describes as the “third era of companywide modernization and cloud adoption” to be ushered in much faster than anticipated.

Want to get your business in on the modernization land rush? Click here to check out our FREE in-depth guide: Adopting and Migrating to the Cloud.