A CloudBolt Software survey of 500 senior IT, DevOps, security and finance leaders found 79% are struggling under the weight of managing multiple cloud computing environments.
The survey from CloudBolt Software, a provider of a cloud management platform, found specifically that more than three-quarters of respondents (78%) said they have too many cloud tools throughout their enterprise, and 80% struggled to achieve comprehensive visibility into cloud usage and spending. A total of 80% also noted that their current approach to cloud computing created new security vulnerabilities.
A full 88% said they need a “manager of managers” that would enable them to unify the various silos that have multiplied across their IT environment.
Nevertheless, 78% of respondents said that moving to the cloud enabled them to achieve cost savings compared to running applications in an on-premises IT environment.
CloudBolt Software CEO Jeff Kukowski said the issue is not so much that IT organizations regret shifting workloads to the cloud; instead, the issue is finding a way to manage multiple clouds, each with their own set of tools and frameworks that need to be mastered.
It’s not clear whether organizations are deliberately employing multiple clouds or if, because of simple inertia, they have found themselves managing multiple cloud platforms because of decisions made by various development teams. Some IT organizations, for example, employ multiple clouds because they are concerned about either becoming locked into a specific cloud computing service or whether an outage might take all their applications offline at the same time. Others are simply trying to take advantage of services that are better provided by one vendor than another.
Regardless of how IT organizations found themselves managing multiple clouds, the total cost of IT rises as each new platform is added to an IT environment. CloudBolt Software is making a case for an IT framework that provides a layer of abstraction through which the management of multiple clouds and on-premises IT environments can be unified. It is more a question of time and degree to which IT organizations will eventually consolidate the management of disparate IT environments under a single control plane that provides the foundation for true hybrid cloud computing, said Kukowski.
There are, of course, a few organizations that have standardized on a single cloud computing platform. The degree to which those organizations can maintain that standard will naturally vary as, for example, new workloads that may be optimized for a specific cloud environment are built or as companies acquire other organizations that are running workloads on other cloud platforms. In many of those cases, organizations discover that the cloud services invoked expose a range of proprietary application programming interfaces (APIs) and disparate virtual machines that make migrating workloads a major challenge.
Like it or not, most organizations will be managing multiple IT environments for the foreseeable future. The only thing that is uncertain is the volume of workloads that might be running on any one of those platforms at any given time.
