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Multi-cloud management can end up being a juggling act
The difficulty is that as multi-cloud architectures expand , they become problematic to optimise and they fail to support business requirements .
As cloud environments grow , IT departments quickly lose sight of where their data and workloads are , stacking up costs that are difficult to quantify because of complicated fee structures . In many organisations lack of adequate governance allows developers to spin up , test and develop VMs ( Virtual Machine ) in the cloud which they then overlook while the bills continue to roll in . In the Thales 2021 Data Threat Report , only 24 % of organisations responding said they fully knew where their data is stored .
Poor cloud management means agility , flexibility and the ability to innovate and use new applications are declining for many organisations . IT departments find them difficult to orchestrate . Optimisation has therefore become critical , with organisations estimating they waste 32 % of cloud expenditure , according to Flexera ’ s research .
With so many challenges coming from all directions , IT decision-makers can feel like failed jugglers when the business starts asking questions about why costs are rising without any comparable increase in performance or capability .
Poor tooling and scarce skills
IT leaders need innovative approaches so they can regain control . Overall loss of visibility often arises from the need to use several cloud tools , each specific to a vendor or deployment . This fractured view leaves IT departments unaware of the resources they use across their infrastructure . In many organisations , it is now common for nobody to be confident about which cloud service is best for specific workloads and the additional costs they may rack up if they expand . Nobody is certain that if the business reaches the limits of resource capacity in one cloud , it has the architecture to auto-scale to meet those extra needs . These are critical pieces of insight . Having workloads in the most suitable environment is a definite requirement to optimise performance and cost . So too is the ability to expand cost-effectively .
Infrastructure sprawl , as organisations add capacity without a true strategy , increases security vulnerabilities and drops unexpected bills into IT inboxes , especially when it comes to the costs of data egress from the major cloud providers . It can also compromise confidence in an organisation ’ s ability to meet data sovereignty requirements . Lack of expertise is a particular problem for SMEs . In the 2022 Flexera report , 78 % of SMEs said this was one of their top challenges . Unsurprisingly , given all the challenges , Flexera also found that among all organisations , optimisation of existing cloud use is
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