Rapid adoption of multiple public and private cloud services and infrastructure has created complexity that is amplifying traditional pressures placed on digital businesses, according to new research from BMC, a global leader in IT solutions for the digital enterprise. As a result, organisations are realising that current strategies and methods of managing multi-cloud environments need re-thinking, and are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) as an emerging solution.
BMC announced the survey of more than 1,000 IT decision-makers in 11 countries today at its BMC Exchange London event. Conducted by research firm opinion.life, the survey examines how businesses are investing in multiple public cloud solutions from several vendors to optimise costs, stay agile, and mitigate risks. These distributed, multi-cloud environments are also creating a broader attack surface and potentially increasing costs. According to the survey, 40 percent of IT leaders do not know how much their businesses are spending on cloud services in total, rising to 53 percent of IT leaders in the UK.
“The number one driver for adopting multiple clouds is cost optimisation, yet two out of every five IT leaders are completely in the dark on what their organisations are spending on cloud,” said Bill Berutti, President, Enterprise Solutions at BMC. “Multi-cloud has truly changed the game: the traditional way of looking at IT infrastructure simply does not work anymore. IT leaders must consider new ways to manage multi-cloud environments to ensure they are getting the expected benefits from public cloud in terms of cost savings, automated performance optimisation, and increased security and governance.”
Recognising the complexity of managing multiple cloud environments, 80 percent of respondents globally and 85 percent of those in the UK, agree that new approaches and tools are required. Among the new approaches being considered is AI, with 78 percent of IT decision-makers indicating that their companies are looking for ways to apply artificial intelligence as part of their multi-cloud management strategies. However, the UK appears to be behind the curve; just 64 percent of IT decision-makers are considering AI, which puts the UK behind all 10 other countries surveyed by BMC.
BMC offers the following recommendations for organisations to successfully manage multi-cloud environments:
· Gain increased visibility into cloud assets to get the complete picture
· Get a clear picture of cloud costs: it may not make sense to run everything in cloud
· Take a proactive stance to harden a broader attack surface, ensure compliance
· Re-think management approaches: simplify and automate as much as possible
· AI and machine learning can remove repetition out of multi-cloud management
45 percent of the global survey respondents indicated cost optimisation as a reason for using more than one public cloud vendor, with 44 percent indicating a desire to maintain agility and 40 percent mitigating risk with multiple cloud providers. Survey respondents indicated that implementing security and governance policies is the top challenge when managing multi-cloud environments, followed by automation, optimising resource utilisation, and cloud consumption costs. Highlighting the need to address the security challenges amplified by a larger, more distributed, increasingly virtual infrastructure, IT decision-makers indicate that security is the primary area they intend to invest in over the next 24-36 months.
“The majority of IT leaders now understand that the complexity created by multi-cloud is amplifying the traditional challenges business face: security, visibility, cost, performance, automation, and migration,” Berutti continued. “Now they must also adapt their management approach using new technology solutions built for multi-cloud that leverage machine learning and AI to reduce that complexity.”
