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IT Pros Say: Cloud Needs a Makeover

Josh Stella

It's not especially surprising that a new IT survey shows that cloud use for business and government poses challenges. All transformative technologies do. It's the extent of agreement — 96 percent say cloud needs a "makeover" — and nature of the challenges that's worth examining. In significant numbers across the board, respondents cited cloud complexity, compliance and security, cost control, speed of delivery, and domain expertise as the cloud problems their organizations were working to overcome this year.

The Three Cs and Beyond

Compliance, complexity, and cost were the obstacles to effective cloud management that garnered the three top trouble spots. The survey yielded specific complaints around each of those.

Compliance refers to businesses and government agencies or their contractors making certain that internal policies (usually structured around security and system reliability concerns) and regulatory demands (around NIST SP 800-53, HIPAA, ITAR, and other laws) are met. In the survey, almost 44 percent of respondents identified ensuring compliance and security as a top cloud challenge. 39 percent said security and compliance "is slowing us down."

And, when asked to prioritize the chief reason that cloud needs an overhaul, the second most popular response was "it needs to be easier to keep secure," with "it needs to be simplified and easier to use" coming in at number one.

Indeed, turning to ease of use, the nature of cloud's complexity problem was laid bare in several parts of the survey as well. Almost 42 percent said that "managing increasing cloud complexity" was a foremost concern. When asked why their company failed to get the most out of cloud, respondents emphasized that C-level executives (26.1 percent), IT leadership (35.8 percent), and developers (20.3 percent) "don't understand cloud complexity."

Contributing directly to the complexity conundrum are the number of tools and services organizations use and the nature of the problems that tooling can create. In order to make the cloud deliver on business expectations, more than half of the respondents cited high numbers of tools and services in use: 30.6 percent at 6 to 10, 15.8 percent at 11 to 15, and 6.8 percent at 15 or more. Another 38.4 percent use at least 3 to 5 tools and services to make cloud deliver. Tooling developed in house wasn't an answer to complexity either. A whopping 83 percent of respondents indicated that creating in-house solutions only leads to more problems.

The specific complaints are enlightening: in-house tooling requires specialists and time to maintain the tools; in-house tooling involves a lot of egos and, thus, a lot of politics; adopting newly available cloud services is made difficult with our in-house tooling; and, adopting new application architectures is made difficult with our in-house tooling.

The survey further revealed a direct relationship between complexity via tooling and the other top trouble spot, cost. Nearly 70 percent of respondents said they were spending almost as much or more on cloud tooling and services than on the cloud itself! Controlling costs overall was a chief problem that 47.7 percent of respondents were working to overcome this year, with some noting that not only does cloud need to be less expensive in general, but it needs to be easier to reduce costs. Nevertheless, compared with traditional data center operations, 57.7 percent agreed that the cloud had saved them money. A shadow on that strong figure is that another 25 percent were not achieving the savings they expected with the cloud.

In addition to compliance, complexity, and cost issues, almost 36 percent of respondents were concerned about meeting business agility demands — referring to the speed at which they could deliver their product to market with cloud utilized. Finally, a significant 26.5 percent worried about acquiring personnel with sufficient domain expertise in the cloud to make their organization efficient.

What's the Solution?

Undoubtedly, different practitioners will advocate different approaches to the cloud problems this survey and other surveys point out. But, if you can easily go fast, see everything, and keep a system right with one holistic approach, you can dramatically reduce the time spent and money wasted on complicated, multi-tooled operations and compliance regimes that don't take full advantage of cloud's innate character.

No matter the route chosen, businesses and government need an easy-to-understand solution, built for and with cloud, that requires only basic domain knowledge to operate, but that's powerful enough to manage scaled systems.

Survey Methodology: Just over half of the survey respondents identified as IT operations personnel. Others included developers, cloud architects, DevOps engineers, and executives. Organizationally, commercial enterprises, government agencies, small/mid-sized businesses, and startups were all represented. And, the survey covered all phases of cloud maturity in its field of respondents: 35.5 percent using a mix of cloud and on-premise data centers, 29 percent planning to adopt the cloud within the next year, 20.6 percent in the process of transitioning to the cloud, 14.8 percent fully in the cloud.

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IT Pros Say: Cloud Needs a Makeover

Josh Stella

It's not especially surprising that a new IT survey shows that cloud use for business and government poses challenges. All transformative technologies do. It's the extent of agreement — 96 percent say cloud needs a "makeover" — and nature of the challenges that's worth examining. In significant numbers across the board, respondents cited cloud complexity, compliance and security, cost control, speed of delivery, and domain expertise as the cloud problems their organizations were working to overcome this year.

The Three Cs and Beyond

Compliance, complexity, and cost were the obstacles to effective cloud management that garnered the three top trouble spots. The survey yielded specific complaints around each of those.

Compliance refers to businesses and government agencies or their contractors making certain that internal policies (usually structured around security and system reliability concerns) and regulatory demands (around NIST SP 800-53, HIPAA, ITAR, and other laws) are met. In the survey, almost 44 percent of respondents identified ensuring compliance and security as a top cloud challenge. 39 percent said security and compliance "is slowing us down."

And, when asked to prioritize the chief reason that cloud needs an overhaul, the second most popular response was "it needs to be easier to keep secure," with "it needs to be simplified and easier to use" coming in at number one.

Indeed, turning to ease of use, the nature of cloud's complexity problem was laid bare in several parts of the survey as well. Almost 42 percent said that "managing increasing cloud complexity" was a foremost concern. When asked why their company failed to get the most out of cloud, respondents emphasized that C-level executives (26.1 percent), IT leadership (35.8 percent), and developers (20.3 percent) "don't understand cloud complexity."

Contributing directly to the complexity conundrum are the number of tools and services organizations use and the nature of the problems that tooling can create. In order to make the cloud deliver on business expectations, more than half of the respondents cited high numbers of tools and services in use: 30.6 percent at 6 to 10, 15.8 percent at 11 to 15, and 6.8 percent at 15 or more. Another 38.4 percent use at least 3 to 5 tools and services to make cloud deliver. Tooling developed in house wasn't an answer to complexity either. A whopping 83 percent of respondents indicated that creating in-house solutions only leads to more problems.

The specific complaints are enlightening: in-house tooling requires specialists and time to maintain the tools; in-house tooling involves a lot of egos and, thus, a lot of politics; adopting newly available cloud services is made difficult with our in-house tooling; and, adopting new application architectures is made difficult with our in-house tooling.

The survey further revealed a direct relationship between complexity via tooling and the other top trouble spot, cost. Nearly 70 percent of respondents said they were spending almost as much or more on cloud tooling and services than on the cloud itself! Controlling costs overall was a chief problem that 47.7 percent of respondents were working to overcome this year, with some noting that not only does cloud need to be less expensive in general, but it needs to be easier to reduce costs. Nevertheless, compared with traditional data center operations, 57.7 percent agreed that the cloud had saved them money. A shadow on that strong figure is that another 25 percent were not achieving the savings they expected with the cloud.

In addition to compliance, complexity, and cost issues, almost 36 percent of respondents were concerned about meeting business agility demands — referring to the speed at which they could deliver their product to market with cloud utilized. Finally, a significant 26.5 percent worried about acquiring personnel with sufficient domain expertise in the cloud to make their organization efficient.

What's the Solution?

Undoubtedly, different practitioners will advocate different approaches to the cloud problems this survey and other surveys point out. But, if you can easily go fast, see everything, and keep a system right with one holistic approach, you can dramatically reduce the time spent and money wasted on complicated, multi-tooled operations and compliance regimes that don't take full advantage of cloud's innate character.

No matter the route chosen, businesses and government need an easy-to-understand solution, built for and with cloud, that requires only basic domain knowledge to operate, but that's powerful enough to manage scaled systems.

Survey Methodology: Just over half of the survey respondents identified as IT operations personnel. Others included developers, cloud architects, DevOps engineers, and executives. Organizationally, commercial enterprises, government agencies, small/mid-sized businesses, and startups were all represented. And, the survey covered all phases of cloud maturity in its field of respondents: 35.5 percent using a mix of cloud and on-premise data centers, 29 percent planning to adopt the cloud within the next year, 20.6 percent in the process of transitioning to the cloud, 14.8 percent fully in the cloud.

Hot Topics

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

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) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...