Up in the clouds, dreaming of improved IT integration

A SURVEY of 350 IT workers has thrown up the challenges facing the hybrid cloud, with disjointed point tools, silos, lack of visibility, unexpected costs, lack of programmatic optimisation, and the role risk plays in cloud cost-management.

The survey, commissioned by software solutions provider Virtana and fielded in the US and UK by Arlington Research, shows that 82 percent of organisations with workloads running in public clouds have been hit with unnecessary costs.

“The pandemic has accelerated organisations’ journey to the cloud,” said Archana Vankatarman, associate research director of Cloud Data Management, IDC Europe. A “more aggressive move to the cloud” was top of the list of planned changes to IT strategy as a result of the 2020 crisis.

“Public cloud platforms provide enterprises with agile, on-demand, flexible access to resources,” said Vankatarman, “but inefficient cloud operations are emerging as a top barrier. “The belief that they are wasting at least 15 percent of their public cloud spending will drive enterprises to invest in cloud cost-management.”

Survey findings:

  • Disjointed tools: 72 percent of respondents said they were fed-up with piecing together disparate management tools to monitor and manage everything from infrastructure performance to cloud cost and migration readiness.
  • Silos: 68 percent said their teams operated in silos, and 70 percent said limited collaboration hinders their ability to improve business outcomes.
  • Unexpected costs: 82 percent reported unnecessary cloud costs.
  • Lack of programmatic cost optimisation: 56 percent lack these capabilities, which mean wasted time managing cloud costs, or that cloud waste is allowed to fester.
  • Lack of visibility across hybrid and multi-cloud environments: 84 percent of respondents are running workloads in multiple public clouds — yet 86 percent said they could not get a global view of cloud costs quickly enough.
  • Risk and pressure on IT: 66 percent of respondents felt it was hard to understand if they were delivering the service levels a business requires; 65 percent agreed that when there was an issue, they were hard-pressed to identify the business impact.

See the full report here: State of Hybrid Cloud and FinOps 2021