Organisations who have a fragmented cloud environment experience 3.6 times more cloud-related security and availability incidents: Dell Technologies Research

The Cloud Complexity Imperative report reveals that organizations who have a fragmented cloud environment have experienced 3.6 times more cloud-related security and availability incidents in the past 12 months. Interestingly, 27% respondents globally (APJ: 25%) believe that organisations with management consistency across clouds can reduce the number of security breaches, application outages, or other events affecting its public cloud-resident data by 26-50%.

Commissioned by Dell Technologies, VMWare and Intel Corporation, the ESG research insights report on “The Cloud Complexity Imperative”, surveyed over 1,257 IT decision makers across 11 countries at enterprises and midmarket organizations using both public cloud infrastructure and operating a modern on-premises private cloud environment. The report focuses on benchmarking consistent operations management across both public cloud and modern on-premises private cloud infrastructure.

“Organizations are struggling with the complexity of multi-cloud environments, and fragmentation is only expected to increase over the period of time. Organisations see tremendous value in the concept of management simplification. Consolidation and simplification of complex multi-cloud environments will lead to cost saving, reduced security risk, accelerated innovation and overall business agility,” said Surajit Sen – Chief of Staff, Modern Data Centre – APJ, Dell Technologies. “For organizations struggling on their cloud journey, thoughtful analysis should be done to move towards a more consistent infrastructure management experience in order to simplify operations and drive cloud efficiency and effectiveness.”

Perceived Technical Value of Increased Cloud Management Consistency

The study reports that the respondents believed increased cloud management consistency could deliver critical technical improvements. Globally, around three-quarters of respondents claim that increased consistency will lead to faster application development, reduced security risk, and greater cloud agility. Furthermore, if organisations were able to consolidate the management tools they use to manage infrastructure across environments on-premises and in the public cloud:

● 68% respondents in the APJ region believe that they would accelerate cloud onboarding and migrations (Globally-74%)
● 70% respondents in the APJ region believe that they would accelerate application development (Globally-73%)
●  72% respondents in the APJ region believe that they would reduce risk & enhance security (Globally-74%)

According to the study, most respondents believed that if their management was able to increase cloud management consistency, it would save about 70.5 person hours per week (equivalent to nearly two full time employees).

Perceived Business Value of Increased Cloud Management Consistency

Organisations believe that apart from providing technical benefits, it is equally important for cloud management capabilities to help in increasing and reaping more business centric benefits. When cloud management consistency is increased, IT operation teams will be able to free their time from mundane infrastructure tasks and will be able to collaborate with their line-of business counterparts. They will be able to extend their support on tasks like advancing analytics initiatives, rationalizing application portfolios, and even discussing the requirements of the next game-changing business application.

Additionally, with increased cloud management consistency:
● 73% respondents in the APJ region believe that they will improve collaboration between IT and line-of-business stakeholders (Globally-76%)
● 72% respondents in the APJ region believe that they will increased pace of innovation/product development/service delivery (Globally-74%)
● 72% respondents in the APJ region believe that they will reduce costs (Globally-69%)
● 67% respondents in the APJ region believe that they will experience faster time to market (Globally-67%)

Consistent Cloud Management Is key

Globally, around 5% of respondents had actually deployed strategies in order to increase cloud management consistency in their organisations and reportedly said that the scale of improvements that they had seen helped them in gaining better business outcomes and improved efficiency of their operations. While, 90% of organizations with consistent cloud management reported they have increased efficiency and simplified operations as a result.

38% of organisations with cloud management consistency report hybrid cloud initiatives have been very effective at driving value for the organizations compared with 27% of organizations without cloud management consistency. IT organizations with consistent cloud management operations are 3.4x more likely to be viewed as a competitive differentiator.