A survey of more than 500 IT professionals, conducted by Civo, a provider of cloud computing services, suggests that well over a third of organizations need some help managing their cloud computing environments.
Rising cloud costs are often being ignored
According to the survey, 40 percent of respondents admit they have yet to take any action to manage or reduce their cloud service costs. Meanwhile, just over a quarter (26 percent) noted hidden fees and intricate pricing structures have led to unexpectedly large bills.
A full 59 percent also reported their cloud spend has increased in the last 12 months, with 37 percent seeing an increase of 35 percent or more.
Nearly half (47 percent) are concerned about their dependence on the “big 3” cloud service providers, and well over a third (37 percent) said they believe that cloud computing has failed to live up to its promise of cost-effectiveness.
Additionally, 37 percent of organizations are considering a move to alternative infrastructures. An additional 7 percent are actively in the process of transitioning away from the major hyperscalers.
Growing complexity calls for new strategies
As organizations deploy more workloads in the cloud, they face increasing complexity in managing these services. In addition to monolithic applications that run on top of virtual machines, many organizations are now also deploying cloud-native applications.
Running on top of Kubernetes clusters and serverless computing frameworks, each of these platforms typically requires a separate management framework. This, in turn, requires additional expertise. In effect, each time an organization adds applications based on a different architecture, the total cost of IT increases.
At the same time, the attributes of an application are likely to change over time. Workloads that once made perfect economic sense to deploy in the cloud might evolve in a way that makes them less expensive to run in an on-premise IT environment. In addition, many IT organizations are revisiting decisions about where to run specific workloads that were made during the height of the COVID-19 era when the only option was the cloud.
In other scenarios, it’s not uncommon for organizations in the wake of a merger and acquisition to find themselves trying to manage workloads across multiple cloud and on-premises IT environments.
The need for MSP expertise creates new opportunities
Regardless of the reason, the need for additional expertise to run multiple classes of applications is becoming more acute. Managed service providers (MSPs) are generally in a better position to use their existing skills and resources to manage the platforms that an internal IT team isn’t ever really going to find the time and expertise required. In other cases, IT teams are opting to focus their limited resources on building and deploying software. They are leaving the management of the underlying IT infrastructure to an MSP.
Add to that the additional tasks which range from backup and recovery to ensuring cybersecurity, it becomes clear that few IT organizations can manage all those platforms on their own.
As always, the challenge is finding who in the organization is setting the overall IT strategy, which MSPs can play a critical role in helping to execute.
Photo: Gergitek Gergi tavan / Shutterstock
