Cloud has made headway but within most enterprises it is still confined to a minority of workloads. A recent survey revealed that almost 70% of enterprises ran less than a fifth of their workloads on cloud services.
Why is this the case? – Moving applications from each enterprise from legacy is not that easy, with most of these solutions not having been built with the cloud in mind. The truth is also that the discipline around test management means that the test scripts are likely to be quite specific to the legacy infrastructure. There is significant work in recreating test scripts to validate this on the new cloud platform. Perhaps the costs of migration outweigh the potential savings.
Decision making is split – To move the bulk of applications to the cloud will require business agreement and this is not merely a decision for the CIO. Who pays? Answering this question is always going to a significant factor. One way is to take an enterprise approach and sweep all these into a single budget with a savings target to achieve. The decision making can still be business and IT but it is completed at an holistic level.
True commitment to cloud strategy – as can be expected, the challenges to cloud technology change with cloud maturity and according to RightScale research the Top 5 challenges change as follows:
Top 5 Challenges for Cloud Beginners
- Lack of resources/expertise (35%)
- Security (32%)
- Compliance (28%)
- Governance/control (28%)
- Managing costs (27%)
Top 5 Challenges for Cloud Focussed Business
- Security (19%)
- Compliance (18%)
- Managing costs (18%)
- Managing multiple cloud services (17%)
- Governance/control (17%)
This content is taken from an article by David Gee (Computerworld) but reflects what ardent are finding with our clients. For cloud beginners ardent provide the manpower and expertise to help businesses grow and with cloud mature businesses we help across all the challenges as the client requires. For the more cloud mature, the ardent team quickly become an extension of the in-house team helping to drive the business forward from within.
Selecting one cloud over another will always come down to the wants and needs of each individual customer, and the workloads they are running. The two big names in the cloud debate at the moment are Azure (Microsoft) and AWS (Amazon Web Services), both are technologies with which ardent has a lot of experience, and in fact it is often the case that organisations will use both providers within different parts of their operations, for different use cases. Please get in touch with Ashish Raina if you would like to find out more about how software can drive your business forward T: 00 44 (0) 1582 870 180 E: ashish.raina@ardentisys.com
