The ONUG Hybrid Multi-Cloud (HMC) Working Group consists of IT executives tasked with identifying the barriers to cloud adoption and making actionable recommendations for how ONUG can help the community break through these barriers. For example, after each ONUG event, the working group evaluates attendee use case voting results, which often leads to the creation of a new working group in which users and vendors in the community will work together to define the requirements for a pressing use case and develop reference solutions that will serve as Plan-Build-Run blueprints for that hybrid multi-cloud use case scenario.

The HMC Working Group has also defined a taxonomy that groups barriers to adoption into 10 different categories, spanning both technical and non-technical issues and concerns:

• Governance
• Compliance
• Technology frameworks
• Security
• IT resiliency
• Cultural issues
• Education & training
• Observability
• Avoiding lock-in

At ONUG Spring 2019 in Dallas, in a session moderated by the co-chairs of the HMC Working Group, audience members were polled to rank their organization’s top three barriers for adoption, which turned out to be:

• Security (21%)
• Governance (17%)
• Technology frameworks (15%)

See Figure 1 for polling results:

These same attendees were then asked to identify the top 3 areas where the ONUG Community could help the most, which turned out to be:

• Technology frameworks (28%)
• Governance (21%)
• Security (18%)

See Figure 2 for the polling results:

It is no surprise that hybrid multi-cloud security remains a critical concern for IT organizations, and this is likely to remain constant for some time.

The polling clearly shows that users want to learn more about methodologies and technologies related to “technology frameworks.” As a result, ONUG will offer more sessions and content on these topics at future events, spanning DevOps, microservices, container frameworks, service meshes, serverless and orchestration.

The polling also indicates that non-technical issues (Governance, Cultural issues, Avoiding lock-in) also need to be addressed, so look for ONUG to provide a forum for discussing these in future conference sessions, keynotes and on-site training. Experienced IT executives know that the non-technical issues are often more daunting than the purely technical. People and processes are more challenging to manage than machines!

ONUG operates on the principal that community agenda is user-driven, so this type of audience polling, which is conducted across many conference sessions, is critical for prioritizing the needs and concerns of users. In a subsequent blog post, we’ll look at another initiative for better gauging barriers to enterprise cloud adoption, the “ONUG Hybrid Cloud Study” conducted by 451 Research just prior to the Dallas event.

Please don’t miss ONUG Fall in NYC on October 16-17, hosted by Cigna, and ONUG Europe, December 4-5 in London, hosted by Skills Matter and Bank of America — it’s where everything and everyone comes together for two days of intense learning, sharing and networking. Register by July 24 and save 50% on conference admission.