According to the NetEnrich 2019 Cloud Adoption survey, 68% of enterprise IT departments are using public cloud infrastructure today, and 27% of respondents said that doing so is part of their near-term plan

Survey results show that cloud adoption is already very high and growth is likely to continue in 2019. And yet, IT pros remain concerned about a range of cloud issues, including security and privacy.

Per the survey, large enterprises are eagerly adopting cloud infrastructure, applications and services. In fact, 85% of respondents reported either moderate or extensive production use of cloud infrastructure, while 80% said their companies had moved at least a quarter of all their applications and workloads to the public cloud. Meanwhile, 86% of respondents have re-architected some or all of their applications to use cloud-native services.

By making these moves, companies are benefiting from a faster time-to-market for new digital products and services, reduced costs and optimized use of IT infrastructure. However, the pace, scale and priorities associated with public cloud adoption differs from company to company.

Additional survey findings:

Cloud Security is Paramount

72% of IT decision-makers said cybersecurity would be their biggest priority in 2019. Meanwhile, 33% said security is their biggest concern when moving to cloud, and 20% said it was privacy. These data points reflect the growing challenge of how to protect company, employee, customer and product information, while simultaneously accessing the innovation, cost and efficiency benefits that come with moving more infrastructure and applications to the cloud.

Cloud Will Save You Money, But Don’t Lose Sight of Spend

IT decision-makers said security risks (68%) were the biggest concern as regards the future of their IT organizations, but IT spend and cost overruns were a close second (59%). One cause of this might be that IT professionals are spending an inordinate amount of time on day-to-day maintenance (36%), as opposed to forward-looking tasks such as troubleshooting, root cause analysis and post mortems (22%) that might deliver greater cost savings down the road. Another cost-related concern: talent. IT pros said the cost of finding and hiring skilled staff (48%) was their top cost concern.

Driving Business Outcomes Trumps Tech Management as IT Priority

Nearly one-third (32%) of IT decision-makers said that a commitment to driving successful end-to-end customer engagement was IT’s most important job, followed by demonstrated experience deploying and integrating software (27%) and dedicated support (23%). Here again, the data shows that IT’s priorities are shifting. Until recently, IT was focused mainly on “keeping the lights on,” with only a passing interest in how the services it provided impacted customers. Today, with most companies recognizing the direct connection between technology and customer satisfaction, IT’s primary focus has shifted to how it can help the business achieve its stated objectives.

Shadow IT Running Rampant

In a seemingly alarming statistic, 20%-40% of enterprise technology funding is being spent outside IT’s purview, on so-called Shadow IT initiatives, according to 56% of survey respondents. On a list of seven potential top concerns for IT in 2019, Shadow IT finished last. Is this because IT is becoming more comfortable with the idea of business users driving technology decisions and acting as their own support staff, or has IT accepted that, despite its displeasure with this development, it simply doesn’t have the ability to control the problem? Regardless, the statistics indicate that Shadow IT isn’t going away, and that IT pros may have to reevaluate their roles, skills and how best to add value.

DevOps On the Rise, But Still a Ways to Go

Despite the attention it has received over the past few years, and a general acceptance among IT pros of its role and value in the enterprise, a full transition to the DevOps model still eludes many companies. NetEnrich’s survey backs this up, as only 23% of respondents said their organizations have completely switched to DevOps and 18% have not made the shift at all. Instead, most organizations appear to be in a transitional phase, with 59% of respondents saying they use some tools for continuous integration and continuous code.

“A pattern of cloud adoption, which began roughly 10 years ago, is showing no sign of slowing down. On the contrary, the cloud infrastructure and applications business has never been better, and the reason is consumer demand,” says Javed Sikander, CTO at NetEnrich. “Despite the various data breaches, security missteps and occasional outages, consumers of technology services are putting more data into the cloud; they’re using more digital products and services; and they’re buying more devices that run cloud-based applications. Like other consumer activities, users clearly are saying that when it comes to the cloud, they’re willing to accept some risk. Business and IT leaders are getting the message, which explains the big jump in the amount of time and money companies are spending on cloud.”

ABOUT THE SURVEY: The 2019 survey, which ran online in December 2018, was completed by 100 IT decision-makers in companies with 500 or more employees.