There was a time when moving to the cloud was considered risky. When companies were more likely to keep all their IT assets and applications in a datacenter, or even a closet. For years, even decades, there was the perception that physical infrastructure was easier to safeguard and scale.
Then over time there was a progression to public cloud. Cloud provided the ability to flex and scale. Initial entrants, like AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure provided an agile platform for application development and testing. Mid-sized companies and enterprises alike continued to rely on private clouds and a more traditional on-premises model to protect what they deemed critical applications and IT services, including ERP’s and systems of record. But what we have seen more recently, and a trend that was accelerated during COVID, is that barriers to adoption have lowered, and enterprises are moving more workloads to the cloud, including key production applications.
“The average enterprise uses more thanone thousand cloud services!”[1]
As adoption surges, public cloud is no longer a one stop shop. Companies are relying on multiple cloud vendors as part of their increasingly multi-cloud deployments:
“Eighty-five percent of respondents to a new Harvard Business Review–Analytic Services survey, say their organizations use at least two clouds—and a quarter of those respondents are using five or more.” [2]
And as companies leverage cloud more heavily than other services, cloud spend is on track to outpace all other IT spend. COMBINED!
According to Gartner, “Global cloud revenue is expected to reach $474 billion in 2022 — up from $408 billion in 2021 — and is on pace to surpass non-cloud revenue for relevant enterprise IT markets within a few years.” [3]
No longer are we hearing, “how can I move to the cloud?” and “what are the benefits of cloud,” but rather, “I have moved to the cloud, NOW WHAT?! How can I make the most of my deployment?”
The days of “migrating” to the cloud are coming to an end as increasingly more enterprises already ARE RUNNING ON THE CLOUD. Gartner predicts that ”the datacenter is dead and that 80% of enterprises will have entirely cloud-based infrastructures by 2025.”[4]
More and more mid-sized and are looking for ways to manage their existing and increasingly fragmented cloud environments, some find themselves grappling with the growing complexity of multi-cloud operations and cloud costs that are spiraling out of control.[5]
When organizations can coordinate their cloud management and free up their IT talent from dealing with the daily challenges of managing cloud complexity, they can accelerate digital transformation through an increased focus on automation, AI, data analytics, and new insights.
Many businesses do not even know how much they are spending on their cloud services![1]
Here are questions that many organizations we talk to are contemplating.
As companies look for ways to increase efficiencies, they are asking themselves how they can make better use of their cloud services. Ironically, overall cloud spend continues to grow and is on track to increase more than 30% between 2022 and 2023[2]
And with that rising cost of cloud spend comes more complexity and cloud proliferation:.
An estimated one third of cloud spend is wasted![3] And despite that, enterprises continue to grow their cloud spend.
Is it time to clean out your cloud closet? Famous organizer, Marie Kondo uses a methodology for organizing based on arranging like things and then purging the things you no longer need. If things no longer add value or “spark joy” then it is time to declutter your life.
[1] The average enterprise uses 1,295 cloud services – Chief Marketing Technologist (chiefmartec.com)
[2] How to Manage the Complexity of Multi-Cloud Environments – SPONSOR CONTENT FROM HITACHI (hbr.org)
[4] The Data Center Is (Almost) Dead (gartner.com)
[5] some find themselves grappling with the growing complexity of multi-cloud operations and cloud costs that are spiraling out of control.
[6] Many businesses have no clue how much they are spending on cloud services | TechRadar
[7] The cloud system infrastructure services (IaaS) segment is forecast to grow by 30.5 percent in 2023 compared to 2022. The public cloud services market as a whole is expected to grow by 21.3 percent, with only cloud business process services (BPaaS) experiencing single digit annual growth rates.
