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Is Your Cloud Strategy Effective?
Answer these questions to determine your Cloud maturity level.

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Operational

According to the 2023 Flexera State of the Cloud report, the biggest challenges facing most organizations when migrating workloads to public cloud services include understanding application dependencies, assessing technical feasibility and accurately assessing on-premise costs vs. cloud-consumption costs.

Cloud services enables organizations to execute on business strategies faster, but not necessarily cheaper, particularly when there is a lack of consumption governance, management standards and automation tooling. Cloud services skill-sets are still in short-supply but they are critical to successful economic benefits extracted from cloud services consumption.

The concept of a “Single Pane of Glass” relative to cloud services simply refers to a common management platform for multiple clouds that provides unified management of application workloads regardless of location. As the proliferation and sprawl of cloud consumption grows, so too will the need to unify the management from a cost and service orchestration perspective.

Business Ops

Oracle customers generally struggle to understand the most optimal path to migrate and transfer existing Oracle software license entitlements across both application and discrete technology platforms into suitable cloud services that both maximizes cost- savings and reducing Oracle software audit risks.

Cloud enables organizations to do things faster, not necessarily cheaper. As the conversion to cloud consumption accelerates over on-premises infrastructure, having economic controls to prevent runaway costs becomes a critical capability to measure success. Roughly 2/3 of enterprises are not taking advantage of cloud provider discounts to optimize cloud costs and¾ of enterprises are not leveraging automation or manual methods to control consumption costs including no tagging strategy.

Financial

Measuring the economic effectiveness of a cloud strategy is much larger than shifting capital expense budgets to operational budgets. Often times, one of the largest expenses of managing technology is people. Many IT organizations struggle through the conversion of yesterday’s skill-sets with the break-neck pace of tomorrow’s skill-sets. Beyond those boundaries, matching the right cloud resources to the proper workloads becomes part art and part science. If not done correctly and managed centrally, the business could have insufficient cloud spend management skills and processes.

29% of large enterprises are spending more than $12million per year on cloud services. As the number of SKUs available grows exponentially with cloud providers’ menu expansion, choosing the optimal configuration of services to get the best performance at the lowest price requires some additional science. The top (2) initiatives across enterprises in 2023 are maximizing cost-savings and forging ahead with cloud-first strategies.

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Security

Cloud computing is largely becoming a source of differentiation for CIOs in terms of driving digital transformation initiatives. Consumers of cloud services all operate under a shared responsibility model relative to security architectures that requires dedicated skill-sets in order to securely execute on cloud strategies. 61% of enterprises have implemented Cloud Center of Excellence teams and 56% have specific FinOps team functions.

Digitally transforming enterprises is the leading factor driving public cloud consumption which carries the burden of managing cloud-cost sprawl as the leading challenge for cloud-first strategies. For the first time in 10 years, security concerns have dropped to 3rd most important cloud adoption concern behind lagging cloud skills.

When consuming cloud services at scale it is critical to develop a scalable identity access management architecture that provides the right access to the right resources at the right time for the right individuals across multiple clouds platforms for all employees and technology users. Single Sign-On (SSO) models need to evolve across IaaS, PaaS and SaaS models with the agility to not only provision new users and manage policies, but also react to decommissioning users effectively.

Governance

Ponemon Institute research shows that 60% of organizations have a breach due to a known but unpatched vulnerability. There are ways to make patch management less of a challenge, beat the average response time, and avoid being part of a statistic.

According to Gartner, world-wide cloud spending is expected to reach $591million, about a ~21% increase over 2023. With this expected growth, enterprises will need to ensure that cloud spend can be managed with a mature FinOps capability that maps to overall corporate goals and expected outcomes. CIO’s are becoming more involved in helping their line of business counterparts drive down costs. However, according to Gartner 52% of enterprises’ digital initiatives lag CEO expectations.

Talent Development

Effectively shifting to a cloud-first strategy requires the most critical element which is essential technical skills to design, implement and support cloud deployed services and workloads. According to the World Economic Forum, by 2025 50% of all employees will require reskilling, driven by the acceleration of technology adoption.


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