Nordic Enterprises Moving to Public Cloud

Enterprises in the Nordic region are moving away from legacy IT operating models and toward the public cloud, with cloud adoption growing across all industries, according to a new report published today by Information Services Group (ISG) (Nasdaq: III), a global technology research and advisory firm.

The 2019 ISG Provider Lens™ Public Cloud — Solutions & Service Partners Report for the Nordics finds enterprises – in their push for innovation and digital transformation – are leveraging cloud services and reducing their use of traditional IT outsourcing. The resulting savings from these cost-reduction moves, the report finds, are being reinvested in digitalization programs.

Many Nordic enterprises are adopting a multicloud approach, with their CIOs and CTOs focused on a multiyear strategy when deciding whether to use Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform (GCP), the report says.

"Public cloud services are becoming mainstream in the Nordics market," said Barry Mathews, partner and head of ISG North Europe. "The IT market in the Nordic countries has always been one of the most progressive in Europe, and spending on the public cloud has increased there in recent years."

The report sees the Infrastructure-as-a-Service market growing in the Nordics, with enterprises migrating their critical workloads to the public cloud. The growth in public cloud adoption is due to a need for improved data security, an increase in cloud-native application development and an increase in the use of containers and microservices. AWS has an early-mover advantage in the IaaS market, but Microsoft Azure is gaining traction in the Nordics, the report says.

The Platform-as-a-Service market in the Nordics is also growing, but at a more measured pace, the report adds. Many Nordic businesses are modernizing existing applications and creating new applications in the cloud, but finding experienced and affordable platform administrators is a challenge for many organizations.

However, PaaS has helped several Nordic enterprises centralize application development and adopt a managed container platform, the report says. PaaS has also aided organizations in using cloud-native technologies such as low-code/no-code offerings, serverless platforms and microservices, allowing for continuous innovation and faster time to market.

Meanwhile, public cloud service providers in the Nordics are now offering integrated management services for multicloud workloads, the report says. Many service providers have built their own cloud management platforms (CMPs) to help enterprises manage workloads and control spending. Most available cloud management platforms are cloud agnostic and vendor neutral, and many service providers are offering CMPs as part of a bundled package with cloud services.

The 2019 ISG Provider Lens™ Public Cloud —Solutions & Service Partners Report for the Nordics evaluates the capabilities of 49 providers across seven quadrants: Public Cloud Transformation Services, Managed Public Cloud Services, Managed Public Cloud Services for AWS, Managed Public Cloud Services for Azure, Managed Public Cloud Services for GCP, aPaas – Application Development Platforms as a Service, and IaaS – (Hyperscale) Infrastructure as a Service.