If your organization is like most others, it’s using plenty of cloud services – an average of five if yours is a small or mid–size operation, 18 if it’s large .
After all, maintaining in-house IT infrastructure drains valuable time, effort, and management bandwidth for the sake of capabilities that today’s hyperscale public cloud environments can provide far more effectively.
If you’ve concluded that the public cloud services you use are as secure, or even more secure, than your traditional on-premises environment, you’re in good company – nearly two-thirds of IT leaders surveyed last year agree with you .
Why cloud security tops on-premises security
As they bring in yet another cloud service (and mention it only after the fact, if at all), most of the managers of your lines of business probably don’t think much about cybersecurity – but cloud services providers certainly do. Their reputations depend on it, which is why they’re investing in a two-pronged approach to cloud security:
That moment when something happens and you realize it’s time to make changes in your IT environment is unique for each enterprise. But all such moments have something in common, too: you and your IT people soon find yourselves conducting what amounts to an assessment of how effectively your IT environment serves the business. And while self-assessment can be valuable, it also has limitations that can be overcome with the help of a third party who has the expertise to
Did you know that the typical cloud user leverages six clouds on average and 80% of enterprise IT organizations will commit to hybrid clouds this year?
Here, then, is a quick look at the transformative change now occurring under the hybrid, multi-cloud hood:
Accelerated cloud workload automation
For the sake of platform-independence, cloud workload automation is reaching above the orchestration layer to ease application management and accelerate app delivery by speeding up both initial deployment and ongoing DevOps integration.
In this age of the restless customer – not merely digital-centric but also “adventurous, experimental, and downright fickle” – I notice three crucial cloud-shaping trends:
1 The shadow IT underground
Business units everywhere buy cloud services without IT department approval in a mass decentralization of IT “authority.”
Why? Because these cloud services help business units stay competitive, responsive, and innovative at a time when 40% of consumers have expressed “a high willingness and ability to shift spend,” and another 25% are leaning that way .
In my last post, I described key capabilities needed to achieve the IT resilience that’s become so critical to sustaining business resilience in an always-on world.
Getting those capabilities to work for your business takes more than a pro–vider with appropriate IT service/product offerings. You’ll also need a provider with considerable depth of business experience and understanding as well as a vendor–neutral willingness to customize and integrate available technologies.
It’s this combination of technology, business, and integration acumen that puts IT resilience – and business resilience – within your reach.
