Consistent Cloud Management: An unrealized opportunity for organisations

In the race to digitally advance the IT infrastructure and stay competitive, organisations are increasingly adopting multi-cloud strategies. This is because multi-cloud environment have increasingly shown to help organisations achieve greater efficiencies and enhance the performance of their virtual infrastructure.

However, while a multi-cloud strategy can facilitate significant developments in security, flexibility and control, it also comes with its own set of challenges. Management of multi-cloud environment is one such challenge faced by organisations, a practice of developing consistent workflows that manage the infrastructure provisioning, security, connectivity and service discovery across cloud platforms.

To manage this challenge, organizations must understand that a well-defined multi-cloud approach should be able to provide the visibility required to prevent challenges that lead to a complex multi-cloud environment. They key to this is management consistency. In fact, a recent study found that organizations expect to reduce the number of security breaches, application outages, and other events affecting their public cloud-resident data by 30% on average, if they have Cloud Management Consistency.

Cloud Management Consistency is expected to make technology teams more efficient and effective while delivering better business outcomes for the organizations. Here are some of the benefits that organizations enjoy with Cloud Management Consistency and stay relevant in today’s ever-changing IT landscape.

An obvious cost cutter
The lack of consistency across platforms increases the complexity of managing deployments across the cloud platforms. In addition, the differences across platforms results in diverging sets of skill set and training needs for IT team, as organizations upgrade their competencies. All these translate to additional management and manpower costs and increased total cost of ownership.

With Cloud Management Consistency, organizations can ensure infrastructure management efficiency for their IT teams and hence, make application developers more efficient. The study found that organisations expect consistent IT management tools will cut costs by 19% on average.

By optimizing applications for a unified infrastructure platform—wherever it resides—developers can improve their expertise and may eliminate or reduce application architecture decisions that can drive up costs in a cloud world.

Data is safer
Cloud computing has become the preferred way of data and applications storage as it can help speed up operations significantly and also reduce IT costs in a big way. However, cloud computing comes with a risk of losing data that might cost millions to the organizations. This risk increases in a complex multi-cloud environment because it makes the systems more vulnerable to hackers. Switching between different management tools contributes to risk that can lead to loss of critical data.

This is where management consistency can prevent data loss as well as reduce risk and enhance security. The study observed that consistent infrastructure management tools across private and public cloud locations is expected to reduce the number of security breaches, application outages, or other events affecting its public cloud-resident data by 30%, on average.

Improved business agility
The increased agility and operational speed are of critical value to organizations looking at hybrid cloud infrastructure solutions to grow and support their business. Organizations need to have the ability to respond to business challenges, react to market opportunities and get their products to market faster.

With Cloud Management Consistency, organisations will be able to free their IT operations teams from mundane infrastructure tasks and will allow them to collaborate with their counterparts on more important priorities. Interestingly, 97% of respondents believe consistent cloud management will free up IT staff to refocus on new projects.

DQI Bureau | dqindia

To conclude, cloud adoption has outpaced the implementation of common management tools to span both off-premises and on-premises cloud. However, if left unchecked, unmanaged cloud sprawl can lead to inefficient infrastructure management, and budget and timeline overages for cloud projects. Cloud Management Consistency is the need of the hour and has the ability to drive significant technical as well as business outcomes, while making organizations future-ready.

• Surajit Sen
• The author is Chief of Staff, Modern Data Centre – APJ, Dell Technologies