When cloud computing emerged a few years ago in its current form, its biggest selling point was that it was supposed to simplify things for enterprises. If a developer needed to test an application, they spun up an instance to run the test, separate from the production environment, and without worrying about licensing fees. If a sales team needed to better track customers, they tapped into an online service they could all share.
But, alas, as with many things technology-wise, things have only become more complex with the cloud.
Cloud’s growing complexity was recently documented by The Wall Street Journal’s Steven Norton, citing a survey of 46 CIOs by KeyBanc Capital Markets, in which 32% said they plan to use multiple vendors to create internal private cloud systems, while 27% planned hybrid cloud arrangements. The growing fusion of enterprise data centers with cloud services only mean greater complexity, Norton notes, raising “a number of integration and security challenges, which can translate into higher IT spending.”
So, is complexity inevitable, or are there ways business and IT leaders can mitigate this growing complexity? While complex organizations will always require complex solutions, it’s time to step back and take a more holistic view of what cloud is bringing to the enterprise. Importantly, everyone across the enterprise needs to be brought together on the same page, with similar goals.
That’s the view expressed by Rhett Dillingham, vice president and senior analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy, has been observing this trend with cloud. In a recent BriefingsDirect discussion with Dana Gardner, he states that many enterprises are in the same boat: managing complex arrangements of “one or multiple public clouds” in addition “to their private infrastructure, in whatever degree that private infrastructure has been cloud-enabled and turned into a cloud API-available infrastructure to their developers.”
Dillingham points to the need for automation and orchestration to better managing multiple environments, and ensuring greater control of cost, security, and compliance. “This spans from the software and services tooling, into the services and managed services, and in some cases when the enterprise is looking for an operational partner,” he said. “This is about the recognition of the need for partnerships between the business units, the development organizations, and the operational IT organization’s arm of the enterprise.”
Successful enterprise cloud engagements Dillingham has seen are based on such partnerships, he explained — not just “bolting on” cloud capabilities, but rethinking the way business is done. The unnecessary complexity arises when teams within organizations “are operating cloud-by-cloud, versus operating as a consolidated group of infrastructures that use common tooling,” he says.
What makes hybrid and multicloud adoption so complex? Enterprises “have a footprint on at least one or multiple public clouds. This is in addition to their private infrastructure, in whatever degree that private infrastructure has been cloud-enabled and turned into a cloud API-available infrastructure to their developers. They have this footprint then across the hybrid infrastructure and multiple public clouds. Therefore, they need to decide how they are going to orchestrate on those various infrastructures — and how they are going to manage in terms of control costs, security, and compliance. They are operating cloud-by-cloud, versus operating as a consolidated group of infrastructures that use common tooling. This is the real wrestling point for a lot of them, regardless of how they got here.”
Dillingham notes that “I hear a lot of cloud strategies that are as simple as, ‘Yes, we are allowing and empowering adoption of cloud by our development teams,’ without the second-level recognition of the need to have a strategy for what the guidelines are for that adoption – not in the sense of just controlling costs, but in the sense of: ‘How do you view the value of long-term portability? How do you value strategic sourcing and the ability to negotiate across these providers long-term with evidence and demonstrable portability of your application portfolio?”
Commit to an action plan for the enterprise, Dillingham advises. From an IT perspective, “there needs to be a plan in place for how you are maturing your toolset in cloud-native development — how you are supporting that on the development side from a continuous integration and continuous delivery perspective? How you are reconciling that with the operational toolset and the culture of operating in a DevOps model?”
From a business perspective, it means looking ahead — “enabling a deep discussion of where you want to be in three, five, or 10 years, and deciding proactively. More importantly than anything, what is the goal? There is a lot of oversimplification of what the goal is – such as adoption of cloud and picking of best-of-breed tools — without a vision yet for where you want the organization to be and how much it benefits from the agility and speed value, and the cost efficiency opportunity.”
