Going Deeper Than the Surface on Cloud Difficulties

Sometimes, things just aren’t as they appear.

That’s part of why we created CloudBolt Industry Insights (CII), and was the real driving force behind our latest survey “Hitting a Wall in a Multi-Cloud, Multi-Tool World.” We wanted to get at the heart of the real issues we saw cropping up across the market: that practitioners of cloud were inundated with tools, platforms, processes, new and emerging ways to develop and achieve digital business goals, sprawl across multiple clouds and geolocations, etc.

All this was leading to an inevitable truth: that what looked like a lot of great options and developments for purveyors of tech seemed good on the surface, but was actually causing problems that were not easy to see at first.

Everything Looked Good on the Surface

Early in the survey, when asked questions about how things were going with their cloud efforts and digital transformation, respondents seemed to give push back. “We got this,” and “all is well” seemed to surround the responses.

When asked about progress against original drivers for moving to the cloud, more than half of all respondents said they had mostly or fully achieved:

• enterprise acceleration
• digital transformation
• cost reduction
• enterprise agility

Furthermore, 78% believed they had achieved cost savings using cloud versus their old data centers. 75% said infrastructure automation was a first-class executive-level metric in their organization to continuously monitor cloud cost and efficiency, and 63% insisted it was easy or very easy to view all cloud spend and accurately assign costs. Lastly, 67% said it was easy to provision cloud resources without having to be an expert.

Had we ended the study using only the answers to questions #1-7, we would have been led to believe that cloud nirvana was near and all the world’s cloud complexities had been solved. But that’s when things took a turn toward the truth…

Tag – You’re It

A clear measure of how well a company accurately tracks and assigns cloud costs is how well they employ “tagging” (metadata labels assigned to cloud resources to know exactly who provisioned what and why). Tagging also allows administrators to set policies around users or roles and access rights. For tagging to be effective, it needs to be done consistently.

So, the first “real truth of the situation” started to appear when only 9% of respondents said they always employ tagging. 73% said they “sometimes used tagging.

Tagging only part of the time is little more effective than rarely tagging because only occasionally tagging still forces people to hunt down information and degrades true cloud cost/efficiency visibility. Maybe things weren’t all rainbow and unicorns in paradise?

Uncovering Reality

The second half of the study was much more eye-opening. For questions #9-15, the structure shifted to simple statements around specific aspects of cloud suspected to be areas of high friction or difficulty. Respondents were asked to read specific statements and then indicate whether they:

• strongly agree
• agree
• neither agree nor disagree
• disagree
• strongly disagree.

It was as if guards were lowered at this point and respondents exposed their key areas of concern. We’ll get into what those areas are in our next post.

Discover more about these findings, the challenges presented by the Wall for multi-cloud, multi-tool strategies, and how your enterprise can vault over it.

Read the CloudBolt Industry Insights Report: Hitting a Wall in a Multi-Cloud, Multi-Tool World now.