If 2020 was the year where demand and deployment of cloud services ramped up – primarily as a result of the restrictions imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic – 2021 will be the year where more sophisticated strategies will have to be developed.

The reason: to avoid security snafus, vendor lock-in fears, and costly compliance concerns. In other words, these are the same issues which have plagued cloud migration since the first EC2 instances were launched almost a decade and a half ago. But there are better ways to future-proof deployments now.

Kees Birkhoff, group offer leader for cloud at Capgemini, espouses cloud economics as an important part in the process; using a fiscal model to record and monitor cloud usage and expenditure.

“The cloud economics process is continuous and made of regular ongoing reviews,” wrote Birkhoff in a CloudTech op-ed earlier this month. “This enables organisations to track cloud usage through the fiscal year, so that adjustments can be made iteratively, to drive technology performance and organisational productivity long-term.”

It is clear that a long-term approach is required, if the results of an IBM study published this week are anything to go by. According to the research, which polled 380 CIOs and CTOs in the US and UK, almost a quarter (24%) said their IT modernisation journeys were either just beginning or yet to start at all. More than 95% of IT leaders surveyed said they were looking to adopt public, hybrid, or private cloud strategies.

Of that number, more than half (53%) were aggressively pursuing a public cloud strategy, 48% hybrid cloud, and 45% private cloud.

The research found plenty of stumbling blocks in the way of achieving this, however. From a technical standpoint, two thirds (67%) of those polled said they needed greater infrastructure flexibility to drive digital transformation. ‘Even as IT leaders are feeling increased urgency to accelerate their organisations’ transformation, migrating to a multi-cloud environment can present significant challenges to organisations with legacy applications running large data pools’, the report noted.

Elsewhere, 40% of respondents said they did not feel their teams had the right skills to fully meet their IT ambitions. More than three quarters said they would need to rely on trusted partners to provide managed infrastructure services.

The cloud industry never stands still, with once emerging technologies, such as Kubernetes, blockchain, and artificial intelligence (AI), increasingly becoming mainstream. Mastering these skills will help forward-looking organisations move forward to an open, multi-cloud 2021.

IBM is hosting its Cloud Day on January 21, a one-day virtual conference where attendees can learn about IBM’s cloud solutions, experience walk-through demos, and understand where IBM is going in the cloud sector. Specific topics include AIOps and DevOps, cloud native security, Kubernetes, as well as security and governance.

You can find out more about the IBM study here, and register for Cloud Day here.

This article is in association with bemyapp.