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The idea that IT leaders and their teams should pay attention to broader issues outside of their direct remit has been on the agenda of many businesses for years.  IT should play a much greater role, it has been argued, than its traditional speciality of ‘keeping the technology lights on’.  But for many, the scope to achieve greater levels of integration has been limited, not least by the need to control IT investment and drive down costs.

Now, the rapid adoption of cloud is driving a change in how organisations see IT supporting their business as a whole.  A year ago, this meant the emergence of ‘cloud people’, where organisations were increasingly shaping their IT teams with cloud front of mind.  At the time, that was an emerging concept, yet just a year later we are seeing the growth of a broader ‘cloud culture’, whose influence is going far beyond tech teams and right into the boardroom.

‘Cloud people’ are here

Cloud, in its many forms (public, private, hybrid, hyper-scale…), has been a massive success story.  As undoubtedly one of the most discussed tech trends in recent years, people could be forgiven for thinking that it’s already established a winning position in the technology industry.

Yet, according to tech analyst house IDC, cloud spending is some distance away from its likely peak, compared to investment in ‘traditional’ approaches to IT.  Estimates say it will be 2020 before spending on cloud services will come close to equalling what is spent on traditional IT.

But a ‘resource revolution’ is already well underway with organisations using cloud to change how their IT teams work – not at the expense of jobs, but in the pursuit of specialisation.

Recent research from Freeform Dynamics, for example, revealed that reports of cloud-driven shrinkage in IT teams are exaggerated; IT teams are using cloud to develop specialist skills among their staff, rather than reduce headcount. Indeed over the last three years only 6% of research respondents reported some decrease in the size of their IT teams. In contrast, over 70% reported their IT teams had seen ‘some’ increase or a ‘significant’ increase in staff levels.

Over the next three years, while many are expecting a net increase in the size of IT teams overall, the growth rates are slowing (45% indicating growth, with only 7% within this expecting a significant increase).  However, there is a major shift in the make up of IT teams driven by the adoption of cloud and hosting. Looking at the mix of specialists versus generalists, the number of those declaring at least half of their teams being made up of generalists falls off dramatically as the use of cloud goes up.

This confirms that the need for generalist IT staff to take care of routine operations (provisioning, patching, etc), decreases rapidly with cloud adoption. Emphasis is switching to more specialist skills such as architecture, design, security, information management and line-of-business applications.

‘Cloud culture’ is coming

So what’s next? As the bottom-line benefits of cloud are better understood at board level, business leaders are seeing it as way to ensure IT can have a more direct impact on overall success.  ‘Cloud culture’ is changing the way businesses think about the way they operate, not just the way they manage IT.

That idea is supported by the findings of the Freeform Dynamics study, which showed that contrary to the industry marketing hype, only 15% of cloud users were motivated purely by cost savings when adopting the technology.

Instead, 31% said balancing cost management and value was their priority, while 23% were concerned primarily with value. This shows that cloud adoption is being driven by a wide range of objectives, from management of service levels and responsiveness to change, to the management of IT related risks, to simply getting the most from suppliers.

Lessons can be learnt from the startup community, for instance, who enthusiastically embrace cloud solutions to give them flexibility and control as they expand and develop.

Startups are also setting the trend for the type of IT leader and team members needed in today’s economy.  They frequently look for people who can bring an approach that balances business need and technology expertise.  They might not have the deep technical background of their counterparts from the pre-cloud era, but they can very effectively bridge the gap between business need and IT delivery.

An increasing part of the cloud cultural mix is the way businesses also now rely on specialist partners, such as Cloud Service Providers, to make their shift in tech investment pay off.  

CSPs deliver specialist skills, experience and infrastructure to support in-house teams ‘as-a-service’. In the early days of the cloud market, providers often delivered their services in a largely hands-off manner. This may remain appropriate in the context of some requirements, but today, where converged services increasingly make more sense, customers are making a broader commitment to individual providers. In an emerging cloud culture, those providers must become more willing to play an engaged role and get even more involved with the customer’s environment.

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The vast majority of enterprises still lack a mature cloud strategy, according to a recent survey of 6,159 executives conducted by IDC. Just 3% of respondents define their cloud strategies as “optimised,” the highest level of strategic maturity, while nearly half (47%) say their cloud strategies are usually “opportunistic or ad hoc.”

At a time when 68% of surveyed organisations are using cloud to help drive business outcomes (up from 42% just one year ago), the impact of his lack of strategy could have long-term effects on the success of cloud projects.

An “ad hoc” cloud strategy is likely the result of a number of factors: the project-by-project adoption of cloud, the speed of cloud adoption, and the staggered expiration of data centre contracts / equipment (which leads to intermittent cloud migration), to name a few. But no matter the cause, the result is often one or more of the following:

• Isolated cloud projects without common, shared standards
• Ad hoc security configurations, either due to lack of common benchmark or inconsistent application of that benchmark
• Lack of cross-team shared resources and learnings, which could lead to further efficiencies
• Lack of consistent financial data for tracking purposes

In some cases, ad hoc cloud strategy is purposeful: the enterprise wants to take advantage of cloud technologies by experimenting with multiple platforms, usually as part of Center of Excellence or isolated DevOps team that works out the best strategy and then communicates that strategy to the rest of the company. Anecdotally, according to companies that Logicworks works with, some companies often get stuck at this step; they have one or two moderately successful projects, but do not know how to expand usage with the proper controls across the enterprise.

The IDC survey confirms the results of a Logicworks/Wakefield survey conducted in July 2016, which found that nearly half of IT decision makers believe their organisation’s IT workforce is not completely prepared to address the challenges of managing their cloud resources over the next five years.

The report further found that one of the top reasons for this lack of strategy is that many organisations mistake cloud vendors’ claims of “simplified” infrastructure maintenance for “little to no” infrastructure maintenance; in other words, they think maintaining their cloud systems will be easy. The survey found that 80% of IT decision makers feel that leadership underestimates the cost and effort of managing cloud systems, and as a result, they do not effectively plan for the staffing and resources IT requires to achieve highly available, scalable cloud systems.

Clearly enterprises have some work to do — not just to develop a strategy around where and when cloud is adopted, but how to manage and govern these cloud deployments going forward. Whether they choose to do so in-house, with a short term strategic consultant engagement, or with a long-term cloud management solution, most know that they cannot afford to maintain an “ad hoc” cloud strategy. As cloud matures, expect to see a mature, flexible framework for cloud management, automation, and large-scale DevOps as the next must-have for enterprise IT teams.

The post Only 3% of Enterprises Have Optimized Cloud Strategy, Survey Finds appeared first on Logicworks Gathering Clouds.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Impiger Technologies will exhibit in Booth #109 at the 19th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 1–3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Impiger Technologies is a world-class, enterprise software product engineering company specializing in Mobile Application Development, Cloud Applications, Microsoft Technology Solutions, Web Technology and Telecom Services. Impiger Technologies helps enterprises improve business efficiency, productivity, and grow revenue. Impiger Technologies offers a comprehensive set of, cost-effective services from prototype to production and everything in-between.

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According to the latest research from Pluribus Networks, building private clouds is of “critical importance” to effectively utilising public cloud services.

The research, which polled 134 IT professionals and business decision makers who attended this year’s VMworld, found that there was nothing to split public and private clouds among respondents as technologies which will impact their company the most in the future.

43% said public and private cloud respectively were most likely to impact their company over the next three years, followed by 41% for virtual desktop infrastructure and 30% for converged infrastructure. Yet the research also noted only 14% ‘strongly agreed’ that their IT department was set up to meet the needs of the business, putting doubt over new technologies being used.

One area of investment which is a little less important for today is the network; three times as many respondents say the network is a strategic rather than tactical investment. Yet 42% of respondents are adopting software defined networking (SDN) to meet their application challenges, ahead of converged infrastructure (38%), big data (32%), and containers (30%0.

“It turns out most IT organisations are looking for the roadmap to begin their digital transformation journey, and the discussion about wide-scale adoption of public cloud versus building a private cloud in-house becomes a major part of their investigation,” said Mark Harris, vice president of marketing at Pluribus Networks in a statement.

“As their research progresses, they realise that each of these cloud approaches share one thing in common: they each offer the means to bring new business services online quickly and cost-effectively. They also realise that the hybrid mix of private and public cloud is a function of existing capacity and future needs,” Harris added. “It is a pure business planning process.”

Writing for CIO.com earlier this week, cloud computing influencer Bernard Golden noted that most IT organisations will “in the long run intuit the economic unviability of private clouds” aside from certain scenarios, such as data sovereignty. “On-premises infrastructure will inevitably shrink to a fraction of what is currently installed, with much pain realised by the legacy vendor/on-premises infrastructure staff coalition as this dynamic plays out,” Golden added.

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A ‘significant’ disconnect exists between C-level executives and IT professionals when it comes to an organisation’s ability to recover from a disaster, according to new research from Evolve IP.

The study, which polled more than 500 executives and IT professionals, argued that while almost seven in 10 of the C-suite believe their company is ‘very prepared’ to recover from a disaster, the figure translates less well when it comes to IT pros (44%).

The study also found a clear link between disaster recovery (DR) compliance and an ability to recover IT assets if an incident occurs. More than two thirds (67%) of respondents in the banking industry noted their confidence – in an industry where DR compliance was noted by 97% of those polled – compared with 58% of government who were ‘very prepared’ and 55% in technology. Yet the exception which proves the rule is in the healthcare industry; while 89% of respondents said they had DR compliance requirements, just over half felt prepared to recover from an outage.

One in three (33%) companies said they had suffered from at least one incident or outage that required disaster recovery, with hardware failure and server room issues being the primary reason for failover, as reported by almost half (48%) of those polled. Perhaps more worryingly, the number of deliberate attacks as the cause for disasters doubled when compared to similar survey results from 2014.

“In the years Evolve IP has conducted the survey, we’re assured by the fact that companies are becoming increasingly aware of the need to protect critical business assets from a major outage: malicious or unintentional, human error, hardware failure or a natural disaster,” said Scott Kinka, chief technology officer and founding partner of Evolve IP.

“More companies are avoiding risky backup policies considered ‘good enough’ in years past, using backup tape or replicating data to a secondary mirror site less than 50miles from their main data centre, for instance,” Kinka added. “Instead, we’ve seen notable growth in the number of companies developing a disaster recovery plan and educating themselves to the benefits of new DR approaches like DRaaS.”

Writing for this publication earlier this week, Donald Bowker of Sungard AS discussed the right times and methods for testing disaster recovery plans. “Faults and setbacks that come to light during a DE test can be distressing but by testing your DRP you will identify these issues before they become a problem and have the opportunity to fix them,” he wrote. “By making disaster recovery planning a priority and testing your procedures regularly, your business will be fully prepared for any setbacks.”

SYS-CON Events announced today that SoftNet Solutions will exhibit at the 19th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 1–3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. SoftNet Solutions specializes in Enterprise Solutions for Hadoop and Big Data. It offers customers the most open, robust, and value-conscious portfolio of solutions, services, and tools for the shortest route to success with Big Data. The unique differentiator is the ability to architect and implement a complete Big Data architecture specific to your use case. SoftNet Solutions is a premier choice to work with all your Big Data needs from infrastructure up to business consulting.

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