A CIOs Holiday Cloud Wish List

The holiday season is a time for giving and CIOs are making the “nice” list this year. Here are a few wishes for addressing multi-cloud complexity, making your digital transformation dreams come true and a little help with the holiday shopping (a gift awaits at the bottom of this blog)… 

Enable Devs to Focus on Innovation 

As the cloud becomes more complex, companies are spending increased time on building infrastructure. CIOs know the hours devs spend writing code impacts the important work of delivering new services and offerings to their customers. It’s time for the dev elves to build from a unified workshop. If CIOs could have a wish list for innovation, devs would have infrastructure in minutes not days or weeks and security and governance would be built in. And considering a recent study revealed that just 11% of companies consider their CI/CD pipeline to be reliable, the ability to preemptively test their pipeline and share what works across other engineering teams for even faster delivery would make the list, as well. 

Security Guardrails  

In a soon-to-be-released study on cloud security, 72% of respondents admit their companies moved to the cloud and multi-cloud without properly understanding the skills, maturity curve, and complexities needed to make it all work securely. With misconfigurations, zombie VMs, shadow IT, permission errors, and more, security issues are fuller than a Christmas Eve dinner plate. CIOs know multi-cloud accessibility raises the bar even further in terms of risk, compliance, and security. There should be no need to rely on developers to “remember” to make their cloud work secure. Wouldn’t it be nice to rest easier knowing it is built-in properly every time – automatically – and that the right people have access to the right things? With security built into automated self-service IT, you can remove human errors, have hundreds of compliance checks, simplify discovery of unknown workloads automatically, and centralize role-based access control. 

Visibility and Functionality to Optimize Cloud Spend 

Most have limited insights into who is provisioning what, where to optimize costs, or how to remediate security issues.  With multi-cloud and multi-tool adoption continuing to escalate, 4 out of 5 IT pros say their company has hit a wall using existing solutions, and CIOs (and CFOs) want to stop throwing more people and money at the problem. A framework is needed that unifies multi-cloud and on-prem infrastructure to give you a picture of everything in one place with the analysis and reporting tools needed to ensure you are optimizing your cloud spend including automatically identifying savings, updating data automatically and regularly, auto-notifications when attention is needed, and taking corrective action directly through the dashboard to save time. 

Automation, Governance, and Visibility in One Place 

Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes, or “the next open-source star” – there’s too many toys for all the dev girls and boys. The continual adoption of the next favorite tool makes governance, usage tracking, cost visibility, automation, and dev productivity infinitely more difficult. Every dev team makes different cloud and tool choices. In fact, 78% of companies agree that their enterprise has too many tools across too many islands of automation. How can CIOs manage the mess and control the chaos while still offering choice? Organizations need a way to make it simple to stitch it all together and reduce the expertise required. Devs should be able to use the tools they want and manage them from one place, reuse what works, and pull disparate systems together with push button simplicity. Those who figure this out have the competitive advantage. 

Acceleration of Native Cloud 

Native cloud tools provided by AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. are designed specifically to address the clouds they are native to. Unfortunately, in a multi-cloud world, that means different tools for different cloud providers with no effortless way to automate, optimize, or secure workloads between them. CIO’s want an overarching aggregator of all things cloud and automation that simplifies automation, orchestration, visibility, and security/compliance/governance at scale. How about having a common UX across all clouds, automated reporting (aggregate from multi-clouds), one workload for the cloud and better business continuity? It can be done! 

If you think these wishes are just sugar plum fairies dancing in your head, schedule a demo. We will show you how CloudBolt simplifies cloud complexity and accelerates innovation. For a little extra cheer, we will send you a $100 Amazon Gift Card when you attend!