As enterprises have moved their workloads (applications and data) to the cloud, hybrid and distributed cloud environments have become the norm for most companies. Eighty-five percent of respondents to a new Harvard Business Review–Analytic Services survey say their organizations use at least two clouds—and a quarter of those respondents are using five or more.
Many enterprises moved to the cloud to accelerate innovation, agility, and growth, and to realize cost savings with the cloud’s on-demand consumption model. But some find themselves grappling with the growing complexity of multi-cloud operations and cloud costs that are spiraling out of control.
A big focus for enterprises now is managing the increasing complexity and run costs of these hybrid, distributed cloud environments. They want to reduce the complexity of cloud operations (CloudOps) to accelerate innovation in order to keep pace with growing customer expectations.
But not all organizations are managing multiple clouds effectively or economically enough to achieve these goals.
Some organizations use cloud services inconsistently across siloed business units, running the risk of spending too much on unneeded services, missing opportunities to optimize performance, and seeing gaps in managing and securing internal and customer data. While 77% of the survey respondents say their organizations need to improve cloud management, only 27% have created a cloud center for excellence to coordinate and share best practices.
Organizations now looking for ways to manage multiple clouds are finding that engineering-led operations deliver advantages that refine their cloud-workload management strategies.
Managing multi-cloud complexity requires new approaches to information technology operations that enhance automation and simplification. It requires implementing development, security, and operations and site reliability engineering practices into how you design, build, deploy, and operate your applications and workloads for the cloud. It requires having the right skills and policies in place—and implementing a cultural shift in how you develop and modernize applications for the cloud.
Without a consistent means to determine where, when, and how to run their cloud workloads, organizations may find it challenging to capture all the benefits they anticipate from their cloud investments. But by putting CloudOps and cloud financial operations (FinOps) at the center of business strategy, an Organization may more fully realize the potential of its cloud investments through increased agility and efficiency, lower costs, and advanced data protection.
Implementing modern autonomous CloudOps and FinOps strategies into application design, build, and run processes can help all functions share and collaborate on insights, boost agility and efficiency, coordinate spending, and secure company and customer data.
