It is beyond debate that IT modernization efforts require a well-defined cloud computing strategy. In a recent survey, more than 95 percent of IT leaders said they are aggressively pursuing plans to leverage public, private and hybrid clouds to help meet the future IT needs of their organizations.
Unfortunately, few companies have the skills they need to translate strategy into action.
According to the 2022 Flexera State of the Cloud Report, 83 percent of enterprises say that a lack of resources and expertise is their top cloud challenge, up from 76 percent in 2021. It is now the second largest cloud challenge overall. A recent report from A Cloud Guru found that more than 90 percent of IT leaders expect to expand their use of cloud services over the next three years. Nearly half admit they don’t have the expertise that will require.
Experiences during the pandemic vividly demonstrated both the benefits and challenges of cloud technologies. Increased use of cloud services and applications improved business agility and resilience, allowing organizations to make nearly seamless transitions to remote operations. However, accelerated cloud adoption also introduced new complexities and vulnerabilities — many due to human error.
Error-Prone Deployments
A variety of studies find that the rapid deployment and provisioning of cloud technology in 2020 led to sharp rises in configuration errors that left sensitive data exposed. Another study found that up to 80 percent of organizations had public-facing cloud workloads running on unsupported operating systems.
Yet another study found that nearly a quarter of companies weren’t applying even basic protections such as authentication on cloud accounts. Compromised cloud accounts cost U.S. companies an average of $6.2 million last year, according to research from the Ponemon Institute.
Many organizations deal with skills shortages by allowing business users to provision cloud services. Although this helps reduce the burden on IT staff, organizations often wind up running more cloud instances than they need. According to estimates from Cisco, the average enterprise uses more than 700 individual cloud services.
In addition to unexpected costs and wasted resources, user provisioning can lead to more vulnerabilities and greater risk. Users often customize cloud services with plug-ins or setting changes that aren’t recorded, tracked or approved. Over time these ad-hoc changes can cause what’s known as “configuration drift” — a state of inconsistent configuration that creates management, availability and security problems.
Bridging the Skills Gap
Organizations that don’t have the in-house expertise to monitor and maintain cloud environments are increasingly turning to managed service providers (MSPs) for help. Qualified MSPs give customers on-demand access to the cloud skills that are difficult to find in the open market. An MSP can help organizations execute their cloud strategies or provide expertise in specific cloud environments or projects.
Verteks has a team of cloud specialists who can help define and implement cloud strategies. We work closely with each customer to develop a detailed plan for implementing new services and migrating existing workloads. We can help customers evaluate public, private and hybrid deployment models and choose the one that best suits the customer’s requirements.
After deployment, our team can provide ongoing management to ensure the cloud services continue to meet business needs. We can remotely monitor cloud services to maximize performance and resource utilization, protect data and applications, and respond to security incidents.
The cloud is essential to IT modernization efforts, but the growing skills gap is creating deployment and management challenges. Our cloud services can relieve the management burden and help optimize cloud resources for maximum business value.
