You may not know it, but chances are you’ve used some form of cloud computing recently. Whether sending an email, streaming a video or working with colleagues on a shared online document, you’ll have likely done so thanks to the cloud.
Demand for cloud computing has soared during the pandemic, with many employees forced to work remotely and home school their children. While some business IT systems are still housed on the company’s premises (often described as on-prem), the benefits of cloud computing – computing resources such as software or servers, kept in large data centres and delivered over the internet – are now well established. Advantages include the ability to ramp up computing power within seconds and only paying for the computing power your business uses.
Business spending on public cloud services (where businesses rent space in the same cloud, often run by large tech companies such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft) will increase 18% in 2021 to $305bn (£219bn), research company Gartner has forecast. Last year, IT spending on public cloud infrastructure technology, such as servers and data storage, surpassed spending on traditional, on-premise IT for the first time, according to research from market intelligence company IDC.
For all its benefits, the proliferation of cloud computing can also create a new kind of business headache: cloud sprawl. Businesses find themselves having to manage an increasing number of cloud suppliers and different types of cloud technology (public cloud, private clouds, only used by one company and a mixture of the two), plus traditional IT systems run on their premises.
Just as we’ve all become smarter at using digital tools for the workplace, experts say that businesses must get smarter about how they manage their cloud computing to get better value from it.
“IT departments might increasingly think of themselves as service brokers, managing a fluid portfolio of resources,” says Rob Bamforth, founder of Timefort, a marketing consultancy for technology companies.
Along with the sheer proliferation of cloud services, a global shortage of people with cloud computing skills can hamper a company’s ability to manage existing IT systems. Companies can outsource cloud systems management, usually to a technology company or managed service provider, and using cloud management software to reduce manual work, deliver crucial cloud services faster and track the performance of different cloud systems – whether those systems are housed on public clouds or in a company’s own premises.
“[Cloud] management tools that operate across public clouds, on-prem cloud platforms, and increasingly the network edge, are critical to maintain visibility, efficiency and service levels, and to manage risk and compliance,” says Dale Vile, CEO at Freeform Dynamics, an IT analyst firm. Cloud management technologies can give businesses an overview of their cloud IT systems, helping them optimise spending, improve information security, and minimise any waste of computing resources, he adds.
British bank TSB uses Cloud Management from ServiceNow, a digital workflow provider whose technology helps businesses manage their cloud and on-prem IT systems.
Like most banks, TSB uses cloud technology from various suppliers and a significant amount of its customer transactions are carried out digitally.
With Cloud Management, TSB has access to a dashboard that provides an overview of all IT systems – both on-prem and in the cloud – including relationships and dependencies across systems and a real-time view of their performance across platforms. The dashboard also alerts the IT operations department to any IT problems, says Bala Chandrasekaran, head of digital engineering and architecture at TSB. “It gives us a comprehensive map of our systems, across applications and the infrastructure they run on,” he says.
Knowing linkages across IT systems is of critical importance to TSB. A failure in, for example, a customer database, could cause disruption to customer service on other online services or mobile apps that rely on information from the same IT system. Being able to identify this before colleagues or customers are affected is helpful in getting ahead of the problem and resolving it.
The cloud management platform also makes it possible to streamline IT monitoring by consolidating where all the alerts come in. “Rather than looking at 15 different monitoring tools we just have a single pane of glass to look into.”
Cloud Management even helps the bank allocate its IT resources more methodically, showing TSB how much IT capacity is dedicated to certain customer services and whether the computing power is commensurate with, for example, the number of customers using it. From there, they can take steps to flex it accordingly.
Using cloud technology from a handful or more of suppliers may sound like a bigger headache than managing with one supplier. However, some experts say it can be cheaper and produce better results.
“Have good cloud infrastructure monitoring tools in place so that you know your usage patterns and demand,” says Raj Rajarajan, professor of security engineering and director at the institute for cybersecurity, at City, University of London. “Try to mix and match services from different vendors. Just getting locked into one vendor can cost you a lot.”
With cloud computing expected to grow in the foreseeable future, managing bigger clouds will become a bigger challenge for businesses. Cloud management solutions won’t solve all these problems, but they can help reduce the hassle of managing increasingly cluttered and sprawling clouds by automating monitoring of their cost and performance, and detecting problems at an early stage.
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