Realise your cloud potential: State of Cloud, Edge, and Security in Australia 2022-23 Report

The benefits of cloud are more apparent than ever with an increasing number of Australian organisations leveraging it for a variety of critical business functions.

But has widespread adoption elevated Aussie businesses’ confidence in the cloud?

How are local businesses preparing for future migrations of critical applications and workloads to the cloud?

How are IT leaders forming their cloud and edge computing strategy – and what impact is security having?

These are some of the questions we recently sought to answer as we worked with Omdia to uncover how mid and large-sized Australian companies and Government agencies are looking to better leverage cloud technology for resilience, innovation, and business transformation.

A cloud-native approach is gathering steam

In recent years, application-led migrations—especially those apps critical to operations, customer service, and other vital business functions—to the cloud have helped fuel innovation and business change.

However, businesses with whom Omdia spoke with made it clear that they need to extend their cloud migrations beyond simple re-hosting and re-locating. Allowing them to be better positioned to reap more benefits such as improved application cost-efficiency, scalability, reliability, performance and functionality. Leaders indicated these benefits can be realised through more comprehensive migrations such as repurchasing on SaaS, re-platforming, and refactoring their most critical workloads.

Many businesses are still unprepared for the next wave of cloud

In the previous year, only 32% of surveyed Australian businesses considered their organisations “well-prepared” for their respective cloud migration journeys. This year saw an improvement at 42%, but this figure is still not optimal. 

Most Australian businesses still feel unprepared for the business process and technology challenges ahead in their journey to unlock the fullest potential of the cloud. Given that the underlying challenges are wide-ranging, to face them, Australian businesses need more elegant, sophisticated service and platform-led cloud solutions.

Edge is the next step to extend hybrid cloud—but it comes with its own challenges

While edge provides significant advantages in latency, efficiency, and compliance, Australian businesses have some perceived barriers holding them back from larger-scale edge rollouts. These include the lack of in-house skills for edge environment management, technology and solutions complexity, and insufficient understanding of the ROI and competitive differentiation of edge.

Cloud security still a major hurdle that’s deterring adoption

In Australia, the public cloud has been the most attacked surface, with 64% impacted public cloud assets. In addition, 56% of organisations have reported that they have also seen a rise in hybrid cloud attacks, which represented the highest number of ‘serious’ incidents.

These cyber-attacks, as well as breach or loss and cloud networking security risks, can hold businesses back in realising cloud ROI, benefits, and innovation. Business leaders also indicated that they face challenges such as rising security costs and increasing complexity, which contribute to the decline in cloud security preparedness.

Australian market leaders want to move even faster with cloud.

Organisations that are leveraging cloud to its fullest potential stand out from their peers—especially those with hybrid cloud strategies closely mapped to their business needs. But the path toward the cloud’s full potential is not easy.

Executives from market-leading Australian businesses share clear lessons they have learned—sometimes the hard way—in adopting and migrating applications to the cloud. A clearly defined cloud strategy is the best start. Complementing this with a well-designed and tightly managed cloud infrastructure environment, elevated cloud security, a strategic framework for the edge, and the right partners can help spell success today and into the future.

“Good partners are vital to helping us move faster in leveraging the cloud. You can get a competitive advantage over some of the peers in the industry that are lagging behind the times and can’t offer the same thing to their clients.”

Director of IT at a large State Government Department

How can your business realise the advantages of cloud?

Download the Omdia report for an in-depth exploration of the cloud, edge and security themes we’ve covered here, as well as some key recommendations from IT and business leaders we interviewed.

The Telstra Purple and Omdia State of Cloud, Edge, and Security in Australia 2022-23 report is a unique research that sought to understand the realities of cloud computing, edge and security amongst leading Australian organisations. Download your copy here.