Revolgy blog

The cloud or on-premises? How Czech companies approach their IT infrastructure

Written by Agnieszka Kapuścińska | December 31, 2020

In 2019 we asked our clients and other Czech companies whether and how they use cloud solutions. Do companies still perceive the cloud as a threat, or is cloud security an asset to them? How many companies are still running on bare-metal and how many are already in the cloud? Is the transition difficult? And which provider is the most popular Google, Amazon or Microsoft?

“The cloud is an obvious choice for most technology companies nowadays. They run their entire corporate IT infrastructure on it or at least a part of it. For some time now, however, it isn't only the domain of progressive startups. Corporations that have delayed this step until recently for various reasons are starting to migrate to the cloud as well. This trend has been confirmed by our survey, which showed that more than half of companies are considering switching to the cloud at the moment. Every company today is dependent on technology and it's a good sign that they are aware of the main benefits of the cloud. The flexibility, scalability, zero maintenance, zero downtime and ultimately cost savings, these are just the most commonly mentioned advantages of the cloud-native approach.”

Miroslav Vlasák - CEO, Revolgy

The cloud providers, most popular amongst Czech companies are Amazon Web Services (52.7%) ahead of the Google Cloud Platform (38.4%) and Microsoft Azure (29.5%)

Most companies (75.5%) had a cloud-based infrastructure right from the start. Others initially had their own data centre (41.8%), their own server hosting (34.2%) - i.e. were renting them, and servers housing (24.1%) - i.e. had their own servers placed in a professional data centre.

Why are companies moving to the cloud?

The main arguments why companies decided to move to the cloud were flexibility (77%) - the ability to easily create new environments and installations. The lack of need for hardware purchase and maintenance (65.2%) followed by scalability (57.1%) - i.e. the ability of the system, web server or application to scale up together with new features or changes. Other reasons mentioned were resistance to system outages (53.6%) and price (27.7%).

The transition to the cloud is not difficult

The companies we surveyed didn't face any major problems with the transition to the cloud. On a scale of 1-10 (from the easiest to the most complicated), less than 5% of respondents rated implementation progress by 9 and 10. On the other hand, 17.9% of companies rated it 3 and lower, i.e. as a smooth run. In the majority of cases, they managed to undergo the transition using only internal resources and 34.8% sought help from a cloud partner. In other cases (10.7%), the provider helped with the implementation directly.

“Although more and more businesses are moving to the cloud, there are segments of the market where its implementation is slower. This can be said about banking institutions for example, which audit the security of data that are being stored and sent very carefully. Technology companies face the same problem. It should be noted here, that leading cloud providers such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft, invest huge amounts of resources into security and employ large teams of security experts on a scale that would be unaffordable for an average enterprise. Fortunately, banks have overcome the long-established idea that having data in the cloud, rather than in their own data centre, isn't secure, ”

Miroslav Vlasák - CEO, Revolgy

The survey was conducted on a sample of 133 Czech technology companies, 10 of which were branches of a foreign company. Small and large firms were equally represented, with 18% being large firms (500 or more employees). Companies with 11–50 and 51–250 employees were majority with, almost one-third representation of each.

How will cloud trends continue to evolve?

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