Hybrid cloud is a foundation of modern IT infrastructure and it’s becoming mainstream in terms of efficiency, security and scalability. Nevertheless, companies are struggling with a wide range of challenges occurring after the implementation of hybrid cloud infrastructure. Unpredicted cloud bills, idle and underutilized resources are main topics of conversation for the majority of IT departments.
1. Which cloud can provide a highly performed environment?
For an optimal hybrid cloud environment, companies should select the right public cloud platform for their unique purposes. Many established organizations typically prefer to utilize the unique capabilities of several different, popular vendors of the likes of; Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform.
Hystax conducted a survey in early 2020. The results of the survey shed light on some important statistics regarding public cloud usage, as follows:
- The majority of respondents (73%) use AWS
- The second two most popular providers are Azure at 49% and GCP at 31%
- IBM сloud is used by the fewest number of respondents at just 5%
In addition, 68% of respondents declared their unwillingness to migrate to another platform, suggesting that three main public cloud providers maintain their leadership on the market.
Not only was saving money taken into account. Service and workload alignment of vendor offerings to business requirements, are certainly among the main points to focus on. Security, mobility, SLA provisions, and availability level appropriate for the company, must all be taken into consideration to ensure that a particular vendor is a good fit for any given use case.
2. What is the best way to avoid budget wastage?
There are multiple solutions that help IT managers to keep all the cloud spends under control.
Companies tend to use the following:
- Cloud console
- API
- Scripts
When we asked respondents to estimate effectiveness of all these tactics, the average mark was 3.67 out of 5. In the majority of cases, the process of cloud governance and cost optimization is still time and resource consuming, and CTOs and VPs of Engineering are not totally satisfied with the results of the current resource provisioning scheme.
The most simple and straightforward way to overcome that problem and meet tough requirements of IT budget governance is a third party cloud management platform, which is usually presented in a SaaS form. But only 25% of companies use it, while others are still struggling and wasting their budget.
3. What is an average cloud billing variation and its reasons?
One of the challenges to overcome after a hybrid cloud setup is the various forms of pricing. The billing reports or reconciliation files that companies receive from their vendors have different formats. Therefore, bringing these forms together to track, understand and optimize is a monthly obstacle for IT managers. Combine that with the tag-based resource provisioning schemes that most companies tend to utilize and the complexity of the budget and resource governance increases significantly. As a result, many hybrid cloud users receive blind cloud management, overspends, and budget wastage of up to 35%.
Only about 30% of IT managers are aware of all the upcoming cloud bills and could control their spendings. However, cloud bill variation is a permanent problem for ⅓ of IT managers. The opportunity to receive reliable monthly or even weekly cloud budget forecasts can significantly improve the understanding visibility of resource consumption and necessary budgets.
4. Where can I find the latest updates on industry trends?
With a focus on cloud management, cost optimization and provisioning, Hystax polled executives across an array of industries to seek out current trends, mentalities, and results as they pertain to trends impacting cloud adoption, future cloud plans, cost optimization.
For a deeper dive into the industry benchmarks, trends and best practices of cloud adoption and hybrid cloud management, mentioned above, plus many more trends and insights, feel free to download our comprehensive survey report, including key insights uncovered from the 125+ executives surveyed.
