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New EMA Research Examines Cloud Optimization for Service Delivery

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), a leading IT and data management research and consulting firm, released its latest research report entitled: Optimizing Cloud for Service Delivery.

This new research reflects the more advanced position of cloud adoption patterns today. While it still addresses core drivers, objectives, and obstacles as they are evolving, Optimizing Cloud makes what may well be the industry’s most granular assessment on how management technologies and cloud accelerants (e.g., converged infrastructure) are being combined into successful clusters or footprints. Optimizing Cloud for Service Delivery begins to shade in meaningful taxonomy of technology patterns, organizational focus, and cloud success.

“Just as there are cirrus, cumulus, nimbus and stratus clouds in the sky with unique combinations – like the stormy cumulonimbus – Optimizing Cloud for Service Delivery sheds light on how internal, external, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS are combining with key management investments in distinctive clusters,” said Dennis Drogseth, VP of Research at EMA. “The research also exposes what combinations are more likely to be successful, and which are not, and why.”

Some of the highlights from the report (based on 1,000 pages of content analysis) are:

* Cloud has advanced to become significantly more critical in importance to a wider range of IT organization than ever before. The trends towards a dedicated “Virtualization or Cloud” Organization continues with a dedicated group called cloud or virtualization support, followed this year by cross-domain IT architecture or infrastructure services.

* As cloud grows in both acceptance and importance, IT organizations are beginning to expand their definitions of “cross-domain” and “virtualized infrastructure.”

Optimizing Cloud for Service Delivery clearly underscores the continued success of strategic cloud adoption in terms of pervasiveness, the criticality and the benefits of cloud-related technologies and services in mainstream IT.

However, in 2012, this research data suggests that rather than viewing cloud adoption as a monolithic phenomenon with linear characteristics, it is a multi-dimensional phenomenon. This research data highlights “clusters” or “patterns” of cloud and service management technology that should become more meaningful over time as both cloud, and service management in response to cloud, mature.

Read Dennis Drogseth's Blog: Optimizing Cloud - Cirrus, Cumulus, Stratus and Nimbus

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New EMA Research Examines Cloud Optimization for Service Delivery

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), a leading IT and data management research and consulting firm, released its latest research report entitled: Optimizing Cloud for Service Delivery.

This new research reflects the more advanced position of cloud adoption patterns today. While it still addresses core drivers, objectives, and obstacles as they are evolving, Optimizing Cloud makes what may well be the industry’s most granular assessment on how management technologies and cloud accelerants (e.g., converged infrastructure) are being combined into successful clusters or footprints. Optimizing Cloud for Service Delivery begins to shade in meaningful taxonomy of technology patterns, organizational focus, and cloud success.

“Just as there are cirrus, cumulus, nimbus and stratus clouds in the sky with unique combinations – like the stormy cumulonimbus – Optimizing Cloud for Service Delivery sheds light on how internal, external, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS are combining with key management investments in distinctive clusters,” said Dennis Drogseth, VP of Research at EMA. “The research also exposes what combinations are more likely to be successful, and which are not, and why.”

Some of the highlights from the report (based on 1,000 pages of content analysis) are:

* Cloud has advanced to become significantly more critical in importance to a wider range of IT organization than ever before. The trends towards a dedicated “Virtualization or Cloud” Organization continues with a dedicated group called cloud or virtualization support, followed this year by cross-domain IT architecture or infrastructure services.

* As cloud grows in both acceptance and importance, IT organizations are beginning to expand their definitions of “cross-domain” and “virtualized infrastructure.”

Optimizing Cloud for Service Delivery clearly underscores the continued success of strategic cloud adoption in terms of pervasiveness, the criticality and the benefits of cloud-related technologies and services in mainstream IT.

However, in 2012, this research data suggests that rather than viewing cloud adoption as a monolithic phenomenon with linear characteristics, it is a multi-dimensional phenomenon. This research data highlights “clusters” or “patterns” of cloud and service management technology that should become more meaningful over time as both cloud, and service management in response to cloud, mature.

Read Dennis Drogseth's Blog: Optimizing Cloud - Cirrus, Cumulus, Stratus and Nimbus

Hot Topic

The Latest

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...