While the excitement and interest in the Cloud continue to grow, there is a realization that a whole new level of complexity will need to be introduced into the IT organization. With that, it should come as no surprise that Cloud management is one of the biggest concerns for organizations that are considering moving to the Cloud. In a survey conducted by the IT services firm, 2e2, 71% of businesses are concerned about managing Cloud computing.
What’s triggering these concerns? According to the survey, 68% of the 200 IT directors at large firms said there were significant risks in migrating to the Cloud because of the complex and interdependent nature of their in-house IT infrastructures.
In the article, “Seven in 10 Businesses Worried About Managing Cloud,” Nathan Marke, CTO at 2e2, said while businesses are aware of the different Cloud options that are available, what many are struggling with is establishing whether it is suitable for their strategy, and if so, how they’ll manage a more dynamic Cloud-based infrastructure. Nathan goes one to say,
By and large, the cloud concept is understood. The concern now is how to make it work for the business and how to manage cloud-based services once they are implemented.
With over half of the survey’s respondents worried about losing control of their infrastructure if they moved their systems to the Cloud, Marke said the first step to controlling IT in the Cloud is to “audit the infrastructure and get a clear view on the inter-dependencies of different IT services.”
That being said, I would add that you also need a view into all your physical and virtual services and their inter-dependencies that can be accessed in real-time. To help gain confidence in your Cloud efforts you need to be able to guarantee service delivery and the only way this can be done is having a knowledge into the state of your dynamic infrastructure.
From an IT perspective, the Cloud may be complex, but the fundamentals have not changed. Operations must be able to answer the questions of how services are performing and be able to proactively address issues before they impact users. Without the ability to address these concerns, worries over the hidden complexity will continue to slow and derail plans for the Cloud.
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Image Credit: B Rosen
