Yesterday, during our webinar with GigaOMPro, the audience was asked what was their biggest challenge when it came to cloud management. While technology was an issue, it may come as a surprise that it was not the number one concern (it was second highest response at 24%).
The number one cloud management issue was the organizational structure that was inhibiting unified management (47% ).
This result did not come as a surprise to the panelists and in fact it was a common issue that they are seeing across many enterprise organizations. Michael Dortch's comment was that this was to be expected. People don't like change and neither do existing organizations.
It would be one thing if IT operations was allowed to start from scratch but they are often asked to manage new technology deployments with their existing processes and systems. They they may try to add the "Cloud Module" to bolt on the functionality but the challenge is that if the processes and the systems aren't designed to manage a rapidly changing, highly interdependent infrastructure, their efforts will be met with limited success.
The summary on this point was that without working to remove organizational barriers to be better aligned, Enterprise IT organizations would continue to face challenges when it comes to managing the cloud. As the panel noted, some companies need to hit the wall before they realize a change is needed.
So a great questions to ask, is you organization making changes to help IT management or are you heading towards the wall?
If you missed the webinar, you can still watch the recorded discussion.
