Dive Brief:
- Lack of cloud connectivity undermines enterprise IT and security management, according to a Forrester survey of 449 IT and security professionals commissioned by IT service company Cloudflare. Nearly 40% of respondents said their organizations are losing control over their tech estates.
- While cloud wasn’t the only culprit, it was the primary driver of disorder. Two-thirds of respondents attributed IT and security management woes to the growing number of enterprise applications and 62% pointed to app decentralization. More than half blamed cloud directly.
- Cloud has complicated IT’s job in several respects, the report found. Three in 10 respondents said managing and securing public cloud and data in SaaS environments is significantly more complex than it was five years ago, citing regulatory compliance, hybrid workforce support and cloud-based app sprawl as new challenges.
Dive Insight:
Companies embraced cloud for its agility, scalability and compute capabilities, only to discover new solutions bring different problems.
Easy access to on-demand applications can lead to software bloat and wasted spend. Running workloads on-prem and in one or more clouds creates interoperability friction. Rushed migrations also leave technical debt stranded in cloud.
Observability across cloud platforms and connectivity between multiple clouds and on-prem systems remain elusive goals, Forrester Principal Analyst Lee Sustar told CIO Dive.
“I think all the cloud providers are looking at other clouds that people might want to use as something to be partially integrated into their core management planes, but not extensively,” Sustar said. “Users are pushing for that, but it's not there yet.”
Integration has not been a hyperscaler priority, Sustar said.
“The cloud providers don't have an interest in making it easy,” said Sustar. “So, it's the realm of startups that have emerged in that space to, for example, help manage kubernetes in different clouds. Why isn’t that a feature of the cloud providers? They want their cloud to be at the center of your management universe.”
