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Why Your Multi-Cloud, Multi-Tool Strategy May Be Hitting a Wall

What was the original driving reason your organization moved to the cloud in the first place?

This was the gist of the first question we posed as part of our latest CloudBolt Industry Insights (CII) survey, “Hitting a Wall in a Multi-Cloud, Multi-Tool World.” We picked the largest field of respondents for any of our surveys to date, with 500 of your IT peers from across the globe and across disciplines (ITOps, DevOps, FinOps, and SecOps), to get at the heart of the answer.

We asked because the more we looked at the overall cloud landscape, the less convinced we were that multi-cloud and multi-tool strategies were meeting the needs of today’s enterprises.

Nearly 3/4ths of the survey respondents said they moved to the cloud to accelerate their business. Almost 60% said it was for digital transformation. Just under half said it was to reduce cost, and a similar number said they wanted to increase agility.

While nearly 4 in 5 companies said they believe they’re saving money versus running everything through on-prem data centers, some of the answers regarding cloud visibility begged the question: “How can you know for sure?”

Hitting the Wall with Multi-Cloud, Multi-Tool Strategies

As cloud strategies have evolved and scaled, complexities have exponentially increased. As a result, business units and engineering groups within an enterprise are prone to going it alone. This means a typical enterprise could be faced with potentially thousands of “islands of automation” across teams, business units, subsidiaries, locations, and continents.

While spending time on an island might sound relaxing and fun, these kinds of islands are anything but for an enterprise. Each have their own preference for tools, clouds, and processes. Those islands leave a mess behind for IT. Tools and platforms must be contorted to integrate systems, optimize performance, increase actionable visibility, encourage best practices, enforce governance and compliance standards, and keep digital innovation at a high level.

Here’s the problem: those platforms, be they traditional cloud management platforms, native tools, niche one-off management systems, development tools, and configuration or service enablement tools and the like, were never meant to be used to manage this scale of chaos.

Enterprises are slowly but surely coming to the stark realization that what got them into this multi-cloud, multi-tool morass will not be what gets them out of it. Cloud usage isn’t going backwards across organizations, digital transformation keeps expanding, and new concerns are popping up constantly. Yes, enterprises are hitting a wall when it comes to cloud. This CII report exposes the stress fractures between what worked before and what is needed for cloud success going forward.

7 Key Findings of Our Hitting a Wall Report

CII has a mission of providing a different type of research for enterprise C-Suite, IT admins and developers. CII zeroes in on specific dimensions of hybrid cloud/multi-cloud topics and examines each’s role in digital transformation.

For this report, we wanted to first highlight these seven key findings:

  • Acceleration, Transformation, Cost Savings, and Agility: Companies were clear in stating that these four outcomes were the drivers for moving to the cloud in the first place (73%, 59%, 49%, 47% respectively).
  • 78% of companies asserted they believe they are saving money versus running everything through on-premises data centers. However, answers to other questions regarding visibility later in the survey beg the question: “How could you possibly know for sure?”
  • The Wall isn’t just Mile #20 of a marathon. Fully 79% of respondents indicate they are hitting a wall using their existing tools and platforms. More importantly, they realize these solutions won’t be able to accomplish what they need going forward.
  • You can’t know what you can’t see. Digging into the topic of visibility into cloud costs and spend across tools, resources, and clouds, 80% say they are struggling to get a comprehensive view (apply this finding to what respondents said in #2 above to see why that answer is suspect).
  • 78% of respondents agree that their enterprise has too many tools across too many disparate islands of automation.
  • Multi-clouds, multi-tools, multi-teams are causing multi-headaches for SecOps; approximately 4 out of 5 respondents agree that current cloud approaches are creating new security risks for their enterprise. And those are just the known clouds and tools!
  • A whopping 88% of respondents conclude that an overarching solution that interconnects and manages all the various platforms, tools, and clouds used within the enterprise is necessary to realize the full value of cloud. If ever there was a sign that the market has reached an inflection point, this is it.

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.

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