Management underestimates the time and cost needed for the cloud

While 96 percent of US enterprises expect to increase their investment in cloud management over the next five years, the majority of IT decision makers are not using those services to their fullest potential according to a new study.

The survey findings from Wakefield Research and cloud automation specialist Logicworks show that 80 percent of the 400 surveyed IT decision makers believe that their company's leadership team underestimates the time and cost required to maintain resources in the cloud.

In addition 50 percent report that they are only somewhat confident that their organization could immediately address an issue that led to downtime in cloud services. Also 43 percent of respondents believe their organization's IT workforce is not completely prepared to address the challenges of managing their cloud resources over the next five years.

"Given the significant time and resources associated with cloud transformation initiatives, enterprises need to have a long-term IT operations plan which includes both migration and maintenance strategy," says Stephanie Tayengco, SVP of operations at Logicworks. "To best leverage cloud investments while improving operations and performance, part of that strategy should be automation of repeat tasks to enforce best practices. Enterprises can drive operational agility by freeing up scarce, overburdened engineers to concentrate on innovation and growth-related activities without sacrificing infrastructure performance, security or availability".

When asked about the factors holding back automation, 51 percent of respondents cited security concerns, 43 percent cost, and 37 percent lack of expertise among staff. Vendor lock-in is a concern too with 78 percent of respondents believing that it prevents them maximizing the benefits of the cloud.

More details can be found in the full report which is available on the Logicworks website.

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