Even organizations with strict regulatory requirements are overcoming prior cloud security concerns to update infrastructure, Progress found.
Professionals are using 2020 as a year for cloud migration, according to a Progress report, released on Wednesday. More than half (56%) of respondents said they are currently working on or planning cloud migration projects for this year.
Even companies with regulatory requirements are overcoming prior cloud vendor security concerns to migrate to the cloud; the benefits of the cloud seem to outweigh potential risks, the report found.
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The 2020 Progress Data Connectivity report aims to determine the state of the enterprise information management landscape. The report outlines patterns and insights into the industry’s data management strategies, particularly in regard to regulations, industry standards, and digital transformation priorities.
Migration to the cloud is a major focus throughout the report, but the data also reveals a continuing need for connectivity, the importance of data quality, object storage prioritization, the normalization of system diversity, and more.
Modernization via cloud
The cloud is becoming mainstream as more organizations realize the cost-effective, secure nature of the tech. The report found that the economics and simplicity of the cloud, supported by the growing number of high-level cloud providers, is inspiring companies to migrate their data and apps to the cloud.
The data strategy for many organizations in 2020 is driven by modernization, specifically renovating legacy systems to accommodate cloud platforms.
Industries including IT, education, utilities, engineering, finance, healthcare, and retail all cited their top motivations for modernization as cloud migration and legacy systems migration, the report found.
Cloud migration can be complicated, especially when trying to integrate data sources both on-premise and in the cloud across a firewall. Respondents said they are mostly using a VPN (40%), SSH tunneling (21%), or a reverse proxy (9.5%) to accomplish that task.
However, management of these solutions can get more convoluted in a hybrid environment, when multiple firewalls are involved and scalability is necessary. The report recommended hybrid connectivity solution gateways to help.
Biggest data integration challenges
Data quality is the most critical data integration challenge at 44%, up from 30% of respondents in last year’s survey. The year before, only 14% of respondents selected that as their biggest challenge.
Other major challenges in this most recent survey included data spread across an increasing number of data sources (40%) and integrating cloud data with on-premises data (38%).
Across industries, data quality was the most frequently chosen selection, but data sprawl and data variety also topped many responses, the report found.
Popular computing platforms
- Cloud
The report also surveyed respondents on the platforms and operating systems they or their customers use most to support their applications.
Windows was the clear winner, at 87%, but Linux was also a popular choice by respondents at 65%. Unix/Linux-based operating systems also showed growth, with Mac OS X rising from 15% to 22% this year, the report found.
The growth of Linux-based systems can be attributed to the growing adoption of open-source applicationware–many of which are rooted in Linux OS–as well as the increased use of cloud platforms, which often use Linux as its core operating systems, according to the report.
As for popular cloud providers, Amazon Web Services (48%), Microsoft Azure (47%), and Google Cloud (25%) retained their dominance and even grew in popularity over the past year.