5 Signs You Should Rethink Your Cloud Strategy
At AWS re:Invent 2020, Amazon Web Services announced they’ve launched more than 250 new features in the last year. Cloud tech is evolving faster, and the name of the game is trying to keep up. According to data from the Snow IT Priorities Report, 76% of IT leaders have increased their spending on cloud infrastructure in the past 12 months. With this massive growth, many organizations are becoming reactive with their cloud management strategies — developing solutions to issues as they arise on an ad-hoc basis.
Organizations operating under this mindset risk facing process inefficiencies, duplicate capabilities, and instances of shadow IT. Cloud management is just as critical as more traditional business operations, but many organizations aren’t treating it as such. Businesses often don’t have the expertise or time to build a cloud management program that meets today’s needs. If you’re looking to systematize your team’s expertise and remove the complexity from interacting with dozens of cloud services, a cloud management platform would likely be the answer. But this begs the question…
How do you know if it’s time to invest in a cloud management platform?
We’ll break down a few of the top signs that you’re ready to adjust your cloud strategy.
1. Deploying a new workload takes days or weeks from when it was originally requested
Deploying a new workload should NEVER take more than a few hours, and in most instances, should only take a few minutes. Business agility is a key competitive differentiator for so many organizations, so if your workloads can’t be deployed quickly, infrastructure becomes a bottleneck hampering your ability to compete.
2. Once a workload is provisioned, it lives forever and adds to cloud sprawl
It’s too easy to forget about cloud workloads once a project or task has completed. Without enforced tagging policies and automated lifecycle management, idle workloads live on and rack up monthly bills. With a cloud management platform, workload ownership is never in doubt, waste is easily identified, and resources are decommissioned keeping cloud spending in check.
3. Your IT team performs the same tasks over and over again
The number of workloads under management continues to outnumber the number of IT staff. But the good news is today, basic tasks such as adding disks to a workload can be easily automated freeing up IT’s time for more important tasks and architecting for the future. Automating repetitive tasks is the only way for IT to have time for more complex and value-adding work.
4. A lack of standardization is causing more work
If you don’t enforce standards and automation, every workload becomes a unique entity, troubleshooting issues takes longer and security issues can develop. Standardized service catalog offerings and automated provisioning ensure consistency and allow you to treat your workloads as cattle, not pets.
5. You can’t get visibility of your public cloud instances
Shadow IT has become a hot topic for IT teams during the pandemic. With the surge in remote work, managing shadow IT has become extremely challenging. Cloud management platforms can provide a single pane of glass to manage both your private and public infrastructure, providing visibility of all resources, regardless of how they were provisioned. Often shadow IT exists because there’s no private cloud available that can deliver IaaS as fast as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure, which leads us right back to sign number one—it takes too long to deploy a new workload.
Cloud management platforms can help you ensure that your team, processes and products work together in unison so you can avoid a lot of these issues and more effectively drive digital transformation.
Uncover more signs that you’re ready for a cloud management platform in our full guide, “10 Signs That You Should Invest in a Cloud Management Platform.”