What We've Learned from Media Cloud Adoption Trends
There’s a lot of insight to be found in Cloud Adoption Trends According to Media and Entertainment Leaders, the recent Forrester Consulting global study of cloud adoption trends in the media and entertainment (M&E) industry, which was commissioned by Akamai. We’ll highlight some of the top takeaways and explain why they caught our attention.
Cloud adoption has been smooth, but challenges remain
On the whole, M&E companies report that cloud adoption has gone well, with 92% of survey respondents saying they’ve seen success. But it’s also clear that smooth cloud adoption doesn't mean that all the industry’s challenges are being resolved by cloud providers.
Here are some of the main challenges for tech leaders in the M&E industry:
67% said their organization’s legacy systems are holding them back
48% cited concerns with geographical challenges, such as data sovereignty and localization
48% said the volume of their online processing needs limit their flexibility
But the most central concern remains cost with 47% of respondents saying the growing cost of doing business is a top challenge of working with current cloud providers.
How cost pressures impede cloud-provider relationships
One-third of respondents said the volume of data they are moving has increased by more than half in the past three years.
20% saw data volume increase between 51% and 75%
10% saw data volume increase between 76% and 100%
3% saw data volume increase by more than 100%
And the cost of moving that data has risen in almost the exact same rates and proportions, except that 11% of respondents say cloud costs increased by 76% to 100%.
Lowering — and understanding — costs
As we discuss in our on-demand webinar, this study confirms that M&E companies are always looking for ways to cut cloud-related costs. Nearly three-quarters of respondents in the survey say that cost pressures are causing their organization to consider a move away from a hyperscale cloud provider. More than two-thirds said their companies might repatriate some workloads from the cloud as a cost-easing measure.
Another related frustration comes from cloud bills that are difficult to understand, which was cited by 60% of respondents.
Finding skilled staff is a key to cloud efficiency
Where and how an organization deploys workloads to cloud platforms varies among the M&E industry. While there’s a clear preference for running workloads at the edge, there is also still a broad mix of public and private clouds according to respondents.
88% use edge platforms, edge private clouds, and content delivery networks
75% use on-premises, self-hosted, or private clouds
60% use public clouds
What’s constant is the need to find people with the necessary skill sets to execute cloud workloads. In the survey, 41% of respondents said they lacked the necessary internal technical skills needed to maintain and/or modernize their applications and workloads.
Efficiency is gained when workloads can be matched to the right cloud — where performance can be optimized, latency reduced by locating workloads close to users, and costs kept in check by only spinning up as much compute as the task requires.
Learn more
Download a copy of the full Forrester Consulting study, “Cloud Adoption Trends According to Media and Entertainment Leaders” today.
