Intelligent SME.tech Issue 25 | Page 34

// EXPERT PROFILE //

How to succeed

AS A MULTI-CLOUD JUGGLER

Digital Transformation initiatives have placed an increased pressure on the cloud as more businesses rely upon its use for optimum performance . Matt Nash , Cloud Manager , Pulsant , discusses why IT decision-makers can often feel like failed cloud jugglers when the business starts asking questions about why costs are rising without any comparable increase in performance or capability .

POOR CLOUD MANAGEMENT MEANS AGILITY , FLEXIBILITY AND
THE ABILITY TO INNOVATE AND USE NEW APPLICATIONS ARE DECLINING
FOR MANY ORGANISATIONS .
EPLOYING DATA AND

D workloads with multiple cloud vendors has become normal practice for many businesses . The Flexera 2022 State of the Cloud Report , found that 89 % of organisations globally now work on a multi-cloud strategy .

Strategy , however , is a loaded term . Many organisations that spread into multi-cloud environments without a defined strategy now find they are struggling to control , optimise or provide the full business benefits from uncoordinated architecture .
Exactly how many clouds organisations use will vary , partly according to definitions . In the Cisco Global Hybrid Cloud Trends report , 47 % of respondents employ between two and three public IaaS ( Infrastructure-as-a-Service ) clouds . The evidence from this report is that organisations follow the multi-cloud path because they need to balance security with business agility .
A multi-cloud approach has many advantages . It gives organisations the flexibility to access vendor-specific capabilities they would otherwise struggle to obtain , which is important for SMEs with small IT departments . They may host their web applications on AWS ( Amazon Web Services ) and Exchange servers on Azure . Organisations with a best-of-breed approach to IT also see that multi-cloud helps them avoid vendor lock-in . A business enjoys a wide choice over where to locate data and how it wants to access it , whether for compliance , latency or cost reasons .
Multi-cloud management can end up being a juggling act
The difficulty is that as multi-cloud architectures expand , they become problematic to optimise and they fail to support business requirements .
As cloud environments grow , IT departments quickly lose sight of where their data and workloads are , stacking up costs that are difficult to quantify because of complicated fee structures . In many organisations lack of adequate governance allows developers to spin up , test and develop VMs ( Virtual Machine ) in the cloud which they then overlook while the bills continue to roll in .
In the Thales 2021 Data Threat Report , only 24 % of organisations responding said they fully knew where their data is stored .
Poor cloud management means agility , flexibility and the ability to innovate and use new applications are declining for many organisations . IT departments find them difficult to orchestrate . Optimisation has therefore become critical , with organisations estimating they waste 32 % of cloud expenditure , according to Flexera ’ s research .
With so many challenges coming from all directions , IT decision-makers can feel like failed jugglers when the business starts asking questions about why costs are rising without any comparable increase in performance or capability .
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