Innovative CIOs in Europe are developing a deeper understanding of cloud-native technologies and adopting them faster than companies across the Atlantic, according to new research.
A report published by Information Services Group (ISG) has detected widespread and growing European use of containers and Kubernetes orchestration as the market for such solutions shifts from a hype-and-growth boom to a more mature phase. Companies in Europe are now working to scale up their cloud-native deployments, which increasingly reside in multi-cloud environments.
“As enterprises pursue cloud-native strategies, many are tapping into the strengths of different public clouds, along with on-premises and edge environments,” said Bernie Hoecker, partner, enterprise cloud transformation, with ISG. “This may make their architectures even more complex, but it helps them avoid technical debt or lock-in.”
Companies, he added, are becoming more familiar with both the benefits and the challenges of cloud-native technologies. Migrating legacy applications to distributed, container-based microarchitectures in the cloud can give enterprises faster cycle times for new software and better scalability to meet fluctuating demand, along with smoother integration into DevOps software pipelines, ISG pointed out. However, it warned that a cloud-native approach also requires new skills, new security tools and the means to track and monitor widely distributed software components.
In Europe, recent industry surveys indicate that about three-quarters of back-end developers used containers in 2021, the report alleged. However, many European companies still need assistance to scale cloud-native technologies across their IT environments. A growing number of service providers offer container migration factories and “Day 2” consulting and support to ease the transition.
Cloud-native strategies in Europe often run up against evolving data sovereignty and residency requirements that affect where data can move within distributed application architectures, ISG said. Providers are developing specific tools to address this challenge. Sustainability is also a growing issue.
“Many European companies now require cloud-native observability tools to measure the environmental impact of their operations,” said Jan Erik Aase, partner and global leader, ISG Provider Lens Research. “This makes observability an even more complex undertaking.”
The report names VMware as a leader in the cloud-native field also mentioning Dynatrace, Sysdig, Accenture, AWS, Capgemini, Cognizant, Computacenter, Datadog, DXC, Google, HCL, HPE, Microsoft Azure, Mirantis, New Relic, OVHcloud, Palo Alto Networks, SUSE Rancher, Red Hat, Splunk and Wipro.
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