CLOUD 01732 759725 27 magazine Keeping your feet on the ground New CloudStratex report highlights weaknesses in enterprise cloud initiatives Moving to the cloud has many benefits (see article to left), but it also has risks, with 57.5% of enterprise decision-makers surveyed by client-side IT advisory CloudStratex stating that the transition has increased their IT costs. This is one of several findings in a new CloudStratex Insights Report 2022 (Resilience, Integration & Efficiency – Hidden Cloud Challenges, subtitled Assessing the challenges of cloud’s mid-life crisis), which identifies shortcomings in existing approaches to cloud and legacy integrations and cloud financial management. Almost three quarters (73.2%) of respondents from enterprises with more than 500 employees said their companies would be better supported by higher levels of IT process maturity, especially in cloud financial management. Fewer than 30% of respondents were able to confirm that their organisation doesn’t waste money on cloud subscriptions. CloudStratex CEO Adrian Overall said: “I think the key insight to take away from our research is simply that cloud’s purported benefits – often named in terms of efficiency, agility, scalability and so on – don’t always happen automatically and certainly not without a price that can be tricky to pay without the right planning and execution.” He added: “Organisations are facing unprecedented regulatory pressure to increase their IT resilience, while the glamorous promise of cloud is now being met with the tricky reality of inefficient or semirealised implementations with legacy infrastructure and technology.” A clear majority of survey respondents reported that IT changes, some implemented at speed during the pandemic, and a lack of tools giving visibility over IT environments have led to business outages in their organisations. Three quarters (75.8%) of those surveyed said that a more resilient IT environment would increase their business productivity, with almost the same number (75%) agreeing with the statement that ‘the number and duration of business outages could be reduced if your organisation had a better understanding of its application and infrastructure environment’. In this context, it is significant that 44% of respondents said their organisation’s configuration management database (CMDB) is updated using manual methods, with 39% saying that their CMDB is consistently out of date. This matters because a growing number of enterprises face new and extensive Operational Resilience (OR) requirements in relation to their IT infrastructure. In fact, nearly 70% of those surveyed have compliance-related OR obligations; 66.8% are required to perform contractual reporting on IT OR. Based in London, CloudStratex specialises in outcome-focused consultative practices, helping its clients to achieve sustainable operational resilience, integration and efficiency across their IT environments and broader business.With 112% revenue growth to more than £18 million in its third full year in business, CloudStratex was ranked 27th in the Sunday Times 100 2022 list of the fastest growing independent, privately-owned UK businesses with more than £5 million turnover. www.cloudstratex.com n Are you making use of spare capacity for large processing jobs with flexible start/end times? By using spare capacity rather than provisioning on-demand resources, you’re able to save up to 90% on cost and reduce the energy required to run your workload. n How efficient is your data storage? Tools such as Intelligent Tiering can automatically move infrequently accessed data to cold storage, and for archiving there are options like Amazon S3 Glacier or S3 Glacier Deep Archive. There is a cost benefit to these practices as well, as lower consumption often results in lower spend, which is particularly pertinent in the current economic climate. Ultimately, the way in which your application arrives in the cloud will have a bearing on how you answer these questions, as a fully cloud-native application will be more sustainably architected than one that was simply rehosted via a ‘lift and shift’ approach. On this basis, it’s important not to treat public cloud like another data centre but to think of any migration as a starting point for improving resource, cost and service utilisation. With more than 81% of consumers viewing companies and brands that adopt more sustainable business practices in a more favourable light, according to SmartestEnergy, there has never been a better time to ensure that your digital transformation initiatives also help you to reach your ESG targets. Aled Sage is VP Engineering at Cloudsoft Corporation, which specialises in applications, automation and the cloud. He holds a PhD (Computer Science) from the University of St Andrews and has over 20 years’ experience in developing and operating distributed applications. He also advises on cloud migrations and application modernisation and the challenges of successfully adopting cloud within the enterprise. https://cloudsoft.io/home CloudStratex Insights Report 2022 Resilience, Integration & Efficiency Addressing the challenges of cloud’s mid-life crisis. HIDDEN CLOUD CHALLENGES CloudStratex Adrian Overall
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