Most Enterprises Have a Multicloud Strategy, Virtana Research Finds
Infrastructure performance, capacity, and cost are real challenges for multicloud management as tool sprawl grows, data is siloed, and 63 percent of respondents manually correlate data from five or more tools .
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Virtana, a leading provider of AI-driven solutions for hybrid cloud management and monitoring, has released its latest independent research report, The State of Multicloud Management 2022. The report, based on a survey of 360 CIOs and IT leaders in the U.S. and the U.K. -- all of whom are cloud decision-makers -- reveals that enterprises plan to grow their multicloud environments in 2022; 82 percent of organizations are currently using a multicloud strategy and 78 percent of organizations have workloads deployed in more than three public clouds.
Given the pandemic-induced wave of remote work, it was not surprising to see that the number of respondent organizations with over half of their workloads in the public cloud grew in the last 13 months, or that 51 percent plan to increase their number of public cloud instances by the end of 2022.
Tool Sprawl and Siloed Data Impede Digital Transformation
As organizations continue to move workloads to the cloud, it is increasingly critical to be able to manage it all, including tools, data, controls, and evolving capabilities. The report shows that organizations are dealing with:
- Too many tools: 63 percent of respondents are using five or more separate tools for migration, cloud cost optimization, IPM, APM, and cloud infrastructure monitoring
- Manual processes: 83 percent are expending some level of manual effort to consolidate data from all of these tools, while 53 percent of organizations using 20 tools or more still have manual processes
Without consolidated data, organizations are unable to get a comprehensive and complete view of their infrastructure, and 73 percent state that siloed efforts are limiting their ability to realize the full potential of the cloud.
Cloud Deployment May Be Widespread; Formal Controls Are Not
The report also found that the majority of organizations do not have solid cost and governance controls in place, which are of strategic importance to digital transformation and competitiveness. Although the vast majority agree there is value in both financial operations (FinOps) (87 percent) and cloud governance (96 percent), 70 percent of respondents have not yet developed a mature FinOps practice and 75 percent are lacking cloud governance to guide cloud management.
“After rushing to the public cloud in early 2020, organizations spent last year feeling the business impacts from suboptimal hybrid cloud implementations that ranged from skyrocketing costs and performance problems to management headaches,” said Jonathan Cyr, VP of product management for Virtana.
The complexities of hybrid and multicloud environments are forcing organizations to look for new ways to improve their management capabilities. Two approaches -- workload portability and serverless computing -- have gained traction. Ninety-six percent of organizations see the value in workload portability, but for 71 percent it is not yet an operational reality. Still, over half (58 percent) of organizations believe workload portability will lead to maximized cost savings.
When it comes to serverless computing -- a cloud computing model where cloud service providers (CSPs) manage the servers on behalf of their customers -- 95 percent of respondents see the value in the effort, but only 76 percent are in the early stages of implementing a serverless strategy. To that end, more than half cite increased scalability (55 percent) and reduced cost (54 percent) as top benefits for doing so.
Cyr continued: “This year, organizations are reimagining hybrid cloud strategies and processes and are realizing that in order to maximize the benefits of the cloud they must first understand that unified visibility and simplified management are critical to controlling cost and risk -- paving the way for true business transformation.”
Get the full research report, “The State of Multicloud Management 2022,” here (short registration required).