A new report from SPR revealed what impact the pandemic had over cloud investment and why many IT organizations decided to increase their cloud security budgets and optimize their cloud strategy in the next year.

The move towards cloud was always expected, however, the quick spread of the virus sped up the process, which led many enterprises to be quite unprepared regarding their cloud security and efficiency.

It was reported that, although many IT professionals rated their cloud as mature, it could still benefit from updated initiatives and practices. Indeed, organizations need to adapt their IT operation by implementing DevOps practices, mitigating on-premises IT infrastructure to the cloud, and reinforce cloud security. In order to accomplish that, decision-makers have to increase their operation efficiency, protect consumer data privacy, and enhance security.

Moreover, to improve cloud governance, it was reported that decision-makers should set up an internal central authority to define standard and the best practices for the cloud as well as enhance employee training and education about cloud and improve automation within the company to decentralize governance tasks. However, these remain a challenge to organizations.

Shadow IT still remains an important threat for employees. Thus, to reduce it, decision-makers should implement additional training on authorized tools and on the risks of shadow IT as well as adopting IT infrastructure necessary to support up-to-date tools, establishing centralized guidelines on tech usage, and simplifying the process for new tools.

Therefore, the best way to improve cloud security, shadow IT, and governance would be to give proper training and education to employees.

During the pandemic, companies using a public or hybrid cloud deployments revealed to be very satisfied with their cloud providers. Yet many said they would be likely to switch cloud providers or add another provider in the next year, which could possibly have major alterations to their current cloud infrastructure.

Due to the pandemic, many enterprises have delayed the migration of on-premise IT infrastructure to cloud and the implementation of IT operations to cloud best practices. However, the report states that the priority must remain to modernize the cloud and make rote work more efficient.

Despite IT professionals believing in the maturity and resilience of their cloud strategy, there is still much to do for it to be true. Existing structure needs to be adapted to the new needs and a shift to DevOps is vital, yet, with the current crisis, organizations will require time before implementing these changes.