Public cloud growing at pace – but hidden issues remain

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Public cloud adoption will continue to grow at a rapid pace, but a lack of understanding will prohibit adoption in some organisations, according to the latest research from hybrid IT monitoring provider ScienceLogic.

The research, which polled more than 1,600 IT professionals, found 62% of organisations are already using at least one public cloud, while more than four in five (83%) expect public cloud spend to increase in the next 12 months. Of the main public cloud providers, Amazon Web Services (58%) not altogether surprisingly is the most popular among survey respondents, followed by Microsoft Azure (43%) and Google Cloud Platform (13%).

Yet the research found organisations lack advanced visibility, monitoring and infrastructure control in their public cloud environments. 82% of those polled said they were unable to ensure optimum performance, health, and availability of their public cloud workloads, while almost half (46%) said they did not know how to, or simply do not, proactively monitor their workloads.

This, of course, could spell danger – and for many organisations, it already has. Half of firms polled said they have experienced at least one complete network outage in the past 12 months, with more than a quarter (27%) saying they have had more than two hours of downtime per event. On average, organisations lose about $3.9 million – approximately $12,000 per minute – annually as a result of network outages.

“As hybrid IT and multicloud usage becomes mainstream for organisations, so does the need to simplify workload visibility and management for IT teams,” said Dave Link, ScienceLogic CEO. “Without this deep visibility of dependencies, organisations risk losing millions per year due to network outages that could have been prevented or shortened with the use of monitoring tools.”

According to figures from Synergy Research back in September, the public cloud continues to make significant inroads into the overall IT market, generating almost £13 billion in quarterly revenues for IT firms.