In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since.
Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). For its new report, Enterprise Strategies for Hybrid, Multi-Cloud Networks, EMA surveyed 354 IT decision-makers at companies that maintain a hybrid, multi-cloud architecture. We asked them which parts of their companies are driving cloud strategy. The top responses were:
1. IT leadership (46%)
2. Cybersecurity or IT security (42%)
3. IT infrastructure and operations (41%)
Only 14% selected the C-suite (CEOs, COOs) and only 13% selected lines of business (product management, marketing, etc.). Twelve years ago, these numbers would have been quite different. Back then, cloud teams answered to the business and IT infrastructure teams answered to the CIO's office. An expertise gap developed between these silos. Early migrations into the cloud were often plagued by security risks, compliance violations, and performance problems because cloud developers knew very little about security policies and controls, compliance requirements, routing, DNS, IP address space, etc. Those are skills that live in the IT organization.
Enterprises have learned from their mistakes. EMA research found that only 21% of hybrid, multi-cloud enterprises continue to have siloed IT and cloud teams. Instead, 42% have dissolved these silos. Another 37% have created cloud "centers of excellence" that draw personnel from both groups.
Regardless of this shift, more work remains. EMA zoomed in on the role of the network team because our analysts find that many network engineers and architects continue to be sidelined by cloud teams, even as silos are breaking down. The network team often plays a supporting role, usually provisioning and managing interconnects between data centers and cloud providers. In fact, only 37% of the stakeholders we surveyed believed that collaboration between their network teams and their cloud teams was fully effective. EMA believes that the network team needs to grab a seat at the cloud table to ensure that cloud-based applications and services are resilient and deliver good performance.
Based on our research, EMA recommends that network teams do the following to improve their collaboration with cloud teams:
■ Adopt network monitoring or observability tools that provide good visibility across hybrid, multi-cloud networks.
■ Extend enterprise IP address management into the cloud to provide overlay management of cloud-native DNS services.
■ Adopt additional tools to centralize management of IP address space, traffic routing, ingress/egress controls, and load balancing across clouds.
■ Establish an effective multi-cloud network source of truth that serves as a centralized point of access for operational data.