Don’t let hybrid IT leave you vulnerable to your vendors

Despite the fact that most of UK organisations have adopted some form of cloud solution, 92 per cent of UK businesses don’t intend on placing everything in the cloud yet, highlighting the increasing popularity of hybrid IT. Responding to these figures from the latest Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) white paper ‘The Normalisation of Cloud in a Hybrid IT market’, Martin Prendergast, Co-Founder and CEO of Concorde Solutions argues that in light of this trend, organisations must be vigilant not to let the complexity of a hybrid IT infrastructure leave them vulnerable to vendors.

He said: “The complexity of having both cloud and on-premises solutions as part of your IT infrastructure means that it can become even harder to have visibility of exactly how software is licensed across an organisation. This issue is further exacerbated by the emergence of consumerisation of IT trends like BYOA (Bring your own apps) which is increasingly becoming a big compliance problem, especially when employees begin to download unlicensed software onto company devices.
“The CIF results also revealed that private enterprises had the highest rate of cloud adoption in the last year at just over 80 per cent. Considering that larger companies have the hardest job keeping track of licenses due to the sheer volume of users, visibility of an entire software estate is increasingly becoming an issue,” continued Prendergast.

He concluded: “Vendors are taking notice of this growing complexity and auditing organisations more regularly as an easy revenue boosting exercise. Many even have special teams in place to keep track of their customers and see which ones could be in breach of licensing agreements. With this in mind, is now incredibly important for businesses to have the right business intelligence to make sure that they are not at risk of compliance and governance issues. Hybrid IT is likely to be the model of choice for a while, so businesses should now keep a close eye on their estates to avoid being taken for a ride by software vendors.”