Cloud Barriers Impact the Bottom Line

While most companies are now deploying cloud-based technologies, the 2024 Secure Cloud Networking Field Report from Aviatrix found that there is a silent struggle to maximize value from those investments. Many of the challenges organizations have faced over the past several years have evolved, but continue today.

Among the key findings:

Cost and visibility are top barriers

Cost and visibility are the top barriers to cloud. Respondents report that "cost controls" and "visibility and troubleshooting" (both 45%) are the biggest hurdles to their organization taking full advantage of cloud (i.e. where they are burning the most man-hours ).

Human error is top cause of cloud outages

Legacy approaches and lagging skill sets are causes for cloud security concern. More cloud network outages were caused by firewalls (31.2%) than cyberattacks (15.3%) in the past year. In addition, human error caused 47.1% of outages.

AI is impacting cloud budgets

Unrealistic cloud budgets are resulting in cost overruns and concern about the implementation of generative AI (GenAI) initiatives. 30.2% report their organization's AI initiatives have increased planned investment in cloud. But another 38.4% report AI initiatives have not impacted cloud budgets (25.8%) or even decreased them (12.6%).

Cloud skills gap remains strong

62.6% report their company has struggled to hire the necessary candidates to support cloud initiatives within their organization. 65.7% of respondents reported that they have struggled to find educational resources for learning about high-demand skills such as multicloud network architecture and design.

"Cloud networking and network security have been thought of as utilities – essentials like electricity that enterprises rely on to run their business and just expect to work," said Chris McHenry, Vice President of Product Management at Aviatrix. "But as we've seen from the practitioners behind the infrastructure, there's still a of complexity in the cloud that is ultimately impacting businesses' bottom lines."

Methodology: The survey included more than 400 global respondents spanning security, cloud, networking roles, with several reporting they hold more than one of these roles at their organization. More than 50% of the respondents were from enterprise organizations with more than 2,000 employees.

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Cloud Barriers Impact the Bottom Line

While most companies are now deploying cloud-based technologies, the 2024 Secure Cloud Networking Field Report from Aviatrix found that there is a silent struggle to maximize value from those investments. Many of the challenges organizations have faced over the past several years have evolved, but continue today.

Among the key findings:

Cost and visibility are top barriers

Cost and visibility are the top barriers to cloud. Respondents report that "cost controls" and "visibility and troubleshooting" (both 45%) are the biggest hurdles to their organization taking full advantage of cloud (i.e. where they are burning the most man-hours ).

Human error is top cause of cloud outages

Legacy approaches and lagging skill sets are causes for cloud security concern. More cloud network outages were caused by firewalls (31.2%) than cyberattacks (15.3%) in the past year. In addition, human error caused 47.1% of outages.

AI is impacting cloud budgets

Unrealistic cloud budgets are resulting in cost overruns and concern about the implementation of generative AI (GenAI) initiatives. 30.2% report their organization's AI initiatives have increased planned investment in cloud. But another 38.4% report AI initiatives have not impacted cloud budgets (25.8%) or even decreased them (12.6%).

Cloud skills gap remains strong

62.6% report their company has struggled to hire the necessary candidates to support cloud initiatives within their organization. 65.7% of respondents reported that they have struggled to find educational resources for learning about high-demand skills such as multicloud network architecture and design.

"Cloud networking and network security have been thought of as utilities – essentials like electricity that enterprises rely on to run their business and just expect to work," said Chris McHenry, Vice President of Product Management at Aviatrix. "But as we've seen from the practitioners behind the infrastructure, there's still a of complexity in the cloud that is ultimately impacting businesses' bottom lines."

Methodology: The survey included more than 400 global respondents spanning security, cloud, networking roles, with several reporting they hold more than one of these roles at their organization. More than 50% of the respondents were from enterprise organizations with more than 2,000 employees.

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Implementing AI Isn't the Hard Part Anymore - Adoption Is

Two years ago, almost every customer conversation about AI started with the same questions: Which model should we use? What can it do? Is it ready for the enterprise? Today, those discussions have moved on. CIOs are far more interested in how to govern AI, integrate it with existing systems, prepare their workforce and make it part of everyday operations. The challenge is no longer to prove that AI can deliver value. It's instead about how to embed AI into the business in a way that's secure, scalable and delivers measurable outcomes ...

The Incident Load Is Rising, but Recovery Times Aren't Moving

Two things happened to production incidents between 2023 and now, and they did not happen at the same speed. The first is that a class of dependency that barely existed three years ago now accounts for one incident in ten. Incidents disclosed by AI model and AI application providers rose from 1.7% of all disclosed unplanned incidents in 2023 to 10.7% in 2026 year to date, roughly a sixfold rise; that counts only incidents at AI companies themselves, so the true share is higher. The second is that the time to close an incident has not come down ...

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Rapid AI adoption and the unique ways AI workloads operate is redefining the scope and structure of what these teams must deliver. This shift is forcing organizations to rethink how they manage scale, automation, and control, according to The State of SRE and Platform Engineering 2026, a new report from Dynatrace ...

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Enterprise AI often lacks governed access to where business processes actually execute. Without that access, AI agents may be able to reason, but they cannot operate reliably across enterprise workflows. For AI agents to effectively carry out workflows, they will require integration-layer context and controls. Organizations can implement these prerequisites by providing AI with managed access to the middleware layer ...