Founded on our research with Deloitte Consulting LLP, we developed a four-part blog series. In part one of this blog series, provided an overview of the current state of enterprise cloud adoption, part two explored the key players driving this evolution, and part three covered the use cases that drive them.
In part four, the final post of the series, we’ll explore the four main challenges enterprises face when adopting the cloud.
If you want to learn more about why enterprises are taking to the public cloud, there are plenty more insights to explore in our downloadable research report ‘Understanding Enterprise Cloud Adoption’.
Enterprises face increasing challenges as they take on additional cloud environments. Read on to discover and understand the four key challenges enterprises face in multi-cloud management today.
Cost
Many enterprises spend far more than they need on cloud resources. According to RightScale, users are wasting 35 percent of their spend in the cloud.
Cost complexities:
- Lack of visibility and common systems for governance across clouds
- Variabilities in commercial models and usage terms
- Duplicate and redundant infrastructures
- Complexity of tracking cloud usage
- Right-scaling across multiple public cloud deployments
Security and Compliance
Enterprises often struggle to ensure compliance standards across their environments are managed as carefully as they should be, particularly with regard to meeting rapidly evolving data-handling legislation requirements.
Further, each cloud provider carries its own unique security standards, fragmenting policies across multi-cloud environments.
Security and compliance complexities:
- Increased security risk in cases of cross-cloud sensitive data transfers (movement of data from one environment to another)
- Increased cost and complexity of data encryptions and ownership of encryption keys
- Cloud provider security frameworks that are inadequate for highly regulated industries (e.g. financial services)
- Stringent data protection and localization regulations, especially for healthcare, financial services and government implementations
- Inability to easily check for resource misconfigurations that drive security and compliance risk across applications
Operations
Adopting multiple clouds brings with it a range of operational complexities. With each new cloud, enterprises and their teams must deal with overseeing a range of operationally diverse workloads and environments
Operations complexities:
- Complexity of integrating, managing and tracking multiple cloud service providers
- Difficulty of segregating workloads and optimizing costs for increased efficiency
- Providing repeatable and continuous governance and automation around fundamental operational processes such as automated workflow approvals
- Neglect of underlying infrastructure in cloud migrations, resulting in poor performance and high costs
Application Management
As the scale of operations in the cloud has grown, more and more teams are finding they need to centralize responsibility for tier-one support, moving it from DevOps teams to newly formed Cloud Operations teams.
However, many of these Cloud Operations teams struggle to rapidly troubleshoot the cloud-native SaaS applications developers are building with microservices and containers.
Application management complexities:
- Increased complexity around identity access management and provisioning permissions for application developer teams
- Ensuring the performance and availability of newly delivered cloud-native SaaS applications, due to their scale and the number of objects that must be monitored and managed
- Difficulty standardizing or replicating cloud-native application portability across public clouds
The path forward for enterprise cloud adoption
As enterprises transform, they will move to the cloud to drive revenue, become more agile and maintain competitiveness. However, as they look to meet the needs of specific apps and objectives, many are adopting multiple, differentiated platforms, increasing operational complexity.
To combat the challenges this complexity brings, leading enterprises are realizing they need dedicated Cloud Operations teams and multi-cloud management capabilities to help them improve efficiency, lower cost and drive business forward.
These teams, in turn, must be equipped with efficient, simplified tools to remove the operational barriers between clouds, allowing enterprises to manage them productively and with minimal fuss.
If you liked reading about enterprise cloud adoption through our blog series, download the full ‘Understanding Enterprise Cloud Adoption Report’ to access the complete scope of our findings. There’s plenty more to learn about how and why enterprises are embracing the public cloud through our research with Deloitte Consulting LLP.
Managing your cloud environments doesn’t have to be difficult. Visit cloud.vmware.com to discover how you can take full advantage of the benefits of multiple public clouds, without operational complexity.
