Study: 94 percent of IT leaders fear vendor lock-in with cloud services

Almost all IT managers fear excessive dependence on cloud providers: 94 percent of respondents in a recent survey express concerns about vendor lock-in with Desktop-as-a-Service and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure solutions. The study also shows that 66 percent of IT professionals are actively looking for new DaaS/VDI providers – a significant increase from 58 percent last year.

The survey, commissioned by virtualization provider Parallels, is based on responses from nearly 600 IT professionals, primarily from the USA, Great Britain, and Germany. More than half of the respondents planning to switch intend to implement a new solution within four to six months, with another 17 percent planning to act within the next three months.

High administration effort drives costs

The main reason for the planned switch cited by 54 percent of participants is that their current DaaS/VDI infrastructure ties up too many IT resources. More than two-thirds (68 percent) identify the time spent on administration and management as the biggest hidden cost factor beyond pure license costs – followed by security and compliance efforts (44 percent) and storage and infrastructure costs (35 percent). These operational burdens particularly affect small and medium-sized enterprises.

The survey predominantly covered companies in the mid-market segment (301-1,000 employees, 48 percent) and the enterprise sector (1,001+ employees, 45 percent). The industry mix ranged from classic enterprise IT and software manufacturers to managed service providers and hardware manufacturers. Details about the participants and their companies can be found in the study results.

Data Sovereignty and Security Incidents

The study also shows increasing skepticism towards the public cloud: 87 percent of respondents plan to move parts of their workloads out of the public cloud. Of these, 36 percent prefer hybrid infrastructures combining local data centers and cloud services, while 13 percent want to return completely to on-premises environments. Another 38 percent are evaluating such options. In current practice, the majority of surveyed organizations operate distributed infrastructures: 43 percent run workloads in multiple cloud environments, and another 33 percent combine local data centers with cloud services.

Concerns about data sovereignty are proving to be a significant driver of this new cloud skepticism: 84 percent express worries regarding compliance requirements, data residency, and the risks associated with foreign data centers. These aspects are likely to be particularly relevant for European companies in the context of the GDPR. In parallel, the number of security incidents has increased: 49 percent of respondents reported at least one breach last year, compared to 42 percent the previous year.

The survey also highlights the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in IT administration. The top AI use case is security monitoring (58 percent), followed by cost optimization (50 percent) and automated error detection (47 percent). However, companies surveyed are hesitant about additional investments; only 29 percent are willing to increase their budget for AI functions in the end-user computing area.

It should be noted regarding the study results that Parallels itself is active in the market as a provider of DaaS and VDI solutions such as Parallels RAS. The results from the previous year can be found here.

(fo)