Report: 68% of orgs plan to rely more on AWS managed services in the next 12 months

The push for cloud modernization via Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other public clouds continues to accelerate. However, the relatively scarce talent and cloud platform knowledge required to build, scale and optimize AWS environments has made it challenging for many organizations to reach their cloud goals — or at least to reach them as quickly and cost-effectively as they’d like. To fill requisite gaps in AWS expertise, 68% of organizations using AWS report they plan to become more reliant on cloud managed or professional services over the next 12 months alone, according to a new report from 451 Research (part of S&P Market Intelligence) commissioned by Mission Cloud Services. The report surveyed 950 North American organizations using AWS.

The report underscores AWS’ role as a cloud provider foundational to many businesses’ success. Fifty-nine percent of respondents report using AWS to increase the speed and agility of launching applications, the top single driver for organizations’ selection of AWS. Other key factors include AWS’ broad range of cloud services (a driver for 48% of organizations using AWS), the number of regions and availability zones supported (44%) and AWS’s utility pricing model (41%).

However, when it comes to the AWS challenges that organizations seek outside AWS expertise and services to alleviate, 41% of respondents named cloud performance optimization and cost, 39% cited building cloud-native applications, and 38% reported struggling with migrations from legacy infrastructure to AWS. Other cloud modernization goals that will likely continue to accelerate — such as AI/ML initiatives on AWS and implementing data lakes — were also cited as challenges.

Surprisingly, the report shows that organizations self-describing as sophisticated Amazon Web Services users are actually even more driven to rely on cloud managed and professional services. Among those running more than 80% of their workloads on AWS, 79% plan to rely more heavily on cloud managed services in the next 12 months. Those identifying as being “technology early adopters” show the same eagerness, with 79% of those respondents looking to increase their reliance on external AWS help.

Read the full report by 451 Research.