CLOUD COMPUTING has been marketed as a simpler, more efficient and more cost effective alternative to on-premises IT. On many levels this holds true, but the fact remains that, in spite of (because of?) continued and growing rates of cloud adoption, the modern IT estate has never been more complex. While the cloud has enabled flexibility and agility, the explosion of available choice has actually driven complexity for most IT teams who are now managing multiple platforms, alongside the ever growing presence of shadow IT.
The principals behind cloud computing make IT a simpler, and sometimes cheaper, proposition for organisations to adopt than traditional forms of IT. However it has also increased the capacity for businesses to be more demanding of their IT departments, while expanding the number of potential suppliers and systems that an IT department has to manage and secure.
It’s widely accepted that there will not be a single cloud computing platform for all requirements, and that hybrid cloud often offers businesses a better fitting solution. However, as an IT environment spans over a greater number of different environments, the management overheads and complexity grow.
Indeed, increasing complexity is one of the biggest challenges facing UK IT leaders today. Claranet recently conducted a major pan-European research report on IT trends in the UK, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain and the Benelux, and found that British IT decision-makers are significantly more likely than their European counterparts to struggle with complexity. Almost half (48 per cent) of UK-based respondents reported increasing complexity as one of their biggest challenges, compared with just a quarter of those in Spain.
Driving this complexity, or at least part of it, is the cloud model. As the cloud industry matures, it’s becoming clear that there is a vast amount of choice, and that there is no one cloud solution for all requirements, creating the more complicated world of hybrid IT. While choice is a good thing, it also risks becoming a headache as applications and data are spread over multiple systems, creating an overhead that many IT managers don’t have the resource to deal with or manage. Although start-ups might just find it easier to put everything into public cloud, the picture for most businesses is more complex.
Mid-tier organisations are faced with increasingly complex IT estates, and must balance legacy considerations, different software solutions, and multiple suppliers, which demands new skillsets. Many will have spent a long time trying to consolidate their systems down, but it’s starting to explode out in terms of choice, and the optimum solution today might involve using many different infrastructure platforms – which can shift the IT department’s focus away from the technology and service optimisation to supplier management.
The modern IT estate is comprised of a whole host of different applications, each of which will have different requirements as to how and where they are managed. Most enterprises have a diverse mix of workloads – some heavily regulated, which might need to be kept in-house or on private infrastructure, and others for which public cloud might be appropriate. But working out which applications to move where and when is often easier said than done, which is where trusted partners can help.
Going forward, a supplier that can work over different infrastructures will be essential to simplify the management process and enable the IT department to focus on core functions, and ultimately, decrease complexity. Service providers that have experience in working across different infrastructures can help with matching the availability, performance and security requirements for each application to the right infrastructure service, and can offer enterprises the support and guidance on what will work, and, importantly, what won’t. Successful IT departments use their supply chain correctly and partner with trusted suppliers that can offer the support they need. This in turn can help them to deliver the software and services that will drive the business transformation that the industry said that cloud would deliver.
