Businesses Still Adjusting To Cloud Learning Curve

Despite the explosive growth of the public cloud, there are still major gaps surrounding its adoption and understanding, according to a ScienceLogic survey of more than 1,600 IT professionals.

Of the organizations choosing not to leverage public cloud architectures, about half cite unclear benefits and lack of knowledge, while the rest blame security and privacy concerns, lack of business need, or they simply don’t know why.

The survey found 62 percent of participants are already using at least one public cloud and 83 percent of organizations expect public cloud spend to increase in the next 12 months.

Lost

“On average about $4 million is lost every year by every organization. And then we learned that four out of five organizations don’t have the proper visibility into their clouds,” Yama Habibzai, chief marketing officer of ScienceLogic, told eWEEK. “And as we already know cloud migration—companies embracing multi-colored strategies—is huge today, which is the perfect storm for disaster.”

Habibzai warned the cost of network outages will skyrocket if organizations don’t pay closer attention and plan better for the next five years.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are the most popular public cloud providers, with 58 percent of organizations using AWS, and 43 percent using Azure. Google Cloud platform is a distant third, with 13 percent.

A staggering 82 percent are unable to ensure optimum performance, health and availability of public cloud workloads due to lack of advanced visibility into the public cloud infrastructure.

Meanwhile, 46 percent of participants acknowledge that they do not, or don’t know how, to proactively monitor their public cloud workloads.

More than 75 percent admit that shadow IT and cloud sprawl is happening within their organizations, whether IT teams like it or not, and 65 percent feel that IT has less control over the infrastructure in their public cloud environments.

On average, organizations lose about $3.9 million, or about $12,200 per minute, annually due to network outages, and half of organizations have experienced at least one complete network outage in the past 12 months. Of those, 27 percent experienced over two hours of downtime per event.

Network failures are the source of the majority of reported outages, with 26 percent citing network device failures, 24 percent citing circuit failures and 18 percent citing network configuration errors.

“We believe the public cloud adoption will be a tectonic shift in the information technology space, and it has already started,” Habibzai said. “There [are] just too many reasons not to adopt it. Major cloud infrastructure companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM, plus many other players are investing billions to make it work and win in this space.”

He noted that today, more than half of the workloads worldwide are already in a public cloud, and that will continue to shift.

Originally published on eWeek.