The Hackett Group Senior Director and Global IT Advisory Practice Leader Chris Key talks with Tech Transformation Practice Principal Michael Fuller, Senior Director Jay Ruffin, and Tech Practice Principal Scott Holland about key findings from The Hackett Group’s recent Cloud Migration Study, the largest-ever study of its type.

Show Notes

Welcome to The Hackett Group’s Business Excelleration Podcast, where — week after week —  we hear from experts on how to avoid obstacles, manage detours, and celebrate milestones on the journey to world-class performance. Today's episode is hosted by Chris Key, Global Advisory Practice Leader at the Hackett Group. His guests are Mike Fuller, Principal in the Tech Transformation Practice, Jay Ruffin, Senior Director, and Principal Scott Holland. The focus of today’s discussion is the results of the largest ever cloud migration study conducted to date.

This study was conducted in October-December of 2021 and represented a wide demographic of global companies ranging from $500 million to over $30 billion. The goal was to identify real business value generated by the migration of infrastructure and application to the Cloud. Of the 1,000+ companies that participated, data was collected from 4,000 applications pre and post Cloud. They considered cost, availability, scalability and operations. About 82% of the companies were multi-cloud.

The biggest difference between the top and average performers was their approach to technology. Top performers saw technology as part of their DNA and course strategy, while the averages were just looking for a way to reduce cost. Scott believes it important to recognize that the value of cloud migration goes way beyond cost and scalability. The Cloud promotes availability, agility and ease of operation. In terms of top performers, they were more likely to migrate IT infrastructure and security and migrated much sooner than everybody else.

There are four primary ways which organizations are migrating workloads to the cloud. Companies that do the work up front see much more benefit as compared to companies who go to the lift and shift path. At the end of the day, cloud is the basis of digital operations. The most common goal among all performers was reducing cost. Among top performers, however, the most common goal was to utilize the cloud to enhance their current services and products. Top performers are migrating 52% more apps than others. The cloud is becoming the norm and those who don’t migrate will likely be left behind.

Referring back to our key issues study, Jay defined the Cloud as a foundation for many of these goals. For example, it allows for faster time to value, cost efficiency, engagement from anywhere, and much more. Top performers were able to reduce their infrastructure spend by 37% compared to average performers’ 12%. This significance all comes back to how they manage their portfolios overall. Shifting to security and the influx in data breaches and ransomware attacks, Mike speaks to the board’s watchful eye of these issues. After cloud migration, organizations on average saw a 44% reduction in cyberattacks, while top performers' improvements were even larger.

A complete list of show notes is available here for download.