New CloudStratex report highlights weaknesses in enterprise cloud initiatives
Moving to the cloud has many benefits (see article to left), but it also has risks, with 57.5% of enterprise decision-makers surveyed by client-side IT advisory CloudStratex stating that the transition has increased their IT costs.
This is one of several findings in a new CloudStratex Insights Report 2022 (Resilience, Integration & Efficiency – Hidden Cloud Challenges, subtitled Assessing the challenges of cloud’s mid-life crisis), which identifies shortcomings in existing approaches to cloud and legacy integrations and cloud financial management.
Almost three quarters (73.2%) of respondents from enterprises with more than 500 employees said their companies would be better supported by higher levels of IT process maturity, especially in cloud financial management. Fewer than 30% of respondents were able to confirm that their organisation doesn’t waste money on cloud subscriptions.
CloudStratex CEO Adrian Overall said: “I think the key insight to take away from our research is simply that cloud’s purported benefits – often named in terms of efficiency, agility, scalability and so on – don’t always happen automatically and certainly not without a price that can be tricky to pay without the right planning and execution.”
He added: “Organisations are facing unprecedented regulatory pressure to increase their IT resilience, while the glamorous promise of cloud is now being met with the tricky reality of inefficient or semi-realised implementations with legacy infrastructure and technology.”
A clear majority of survey respondents reported that IT changes, some implemented at speed during the pandemic, and a lack of tools giving visibility over IT environments have led to business outages in their organisations.
Three quarters (75.8%) of those surveyed said that a more resilient IT environment would increase their business productivity, with almost the same number (75%) agreeing with the statement that ‘the number and duration of business outages could be reduced if your organisation had a better understanding of its application and infrastructure environment’.
In this context, it is significant that 44% of respondents said their organisation’s configuration management database (CMDB) is updated using manual methods, with 39% saying that their CMDB is consistently out of date.
This matters because a growing number of enterprises face new and extensive Operational Resilience (OR) requirements in relation to their IT infrastructure. In fact, nearly 70% of those surveyed have compliance-related OR obligations; 66.8% are required to perform contractual reporting on IT OR.
Based in London, CloudStratex specialises in outcome-focused consultative practices, helping its clients to achieve sustainable operational resilience, integration and efficiency across their IT environments and broader business. With 112% revenue growth to more than £18 million in its third full year in business, CloudStratex was ranked 27th in the Sunday Times 100 2022 list of the fastest growing independent, privately-owned UK businesses with more than £5 million turnover.
