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Are we getting ahead of our abilities in the headlong rush to cloud? Moving to cloud doesn't mean the headaches of technology management are also being handed over to a third-party provider -- if anything, the rapid push to cloud may be getting ahead of organizations' ability to keep up.

Thanks to Covid crisis, the year 2020 was a boom year for cloud adoption, and it turns out things got pushed even deeper into the cloud during 2021. There's no end in sight to the cloud boom, and with it, new challenges to technology teams.

That's the gist of a recent survey of 300 IT executives by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, underwritten by Splunk, which finds while at this moment, most organizations still have most of their technology systems in house. But get ready to start bidding farewell to on-premises IT. Things are going to shift dramatically, and within the next two years, most enterprises will be mainly running off the cloud.

Over the past year, 67% say their organizations accelerated the adoption or implementation of already planned cloud applications, services, or infrastructure -- an increase from the 56% who said their organization had done this as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic in the prior year's survey.

Cloud will just keep accelerating, the survey shows. The majority (65%) predict that more than 60% of their IT portfolio will reside in the cloud within two years. This represents a 30-percentage point jump from today. A total of 85% say at least 40% will be in the cloud by 2023, a similar 32 percentage points higher than those reporting that much is in the cloud today.

"However, the rapid acceleration and expansion of cloud has brought its own challenges -- not only in terms of integration and management, but also with regards to new cybersecurity, data privacy, ROI measurement, and cloud talent concerns," the study's authors point out. "With most respondents leveraging cloud in addition to their on-premises systems-and anticipating maintaining such a hybrid cloud infrastructure for the foreseeable future -- the difficulties of managing these complex environments effectively are evident."

For starters, 62% of IT executives say they are having difficulty keeping up with the rapidly evolving technology roles and responsibilities required to manage its increased cloud adoption. Managing data across mixed environments also creates new challenges. "As you add more cloud providers and more applications, your complexity changes a lot," according to Jay Bhat, information security officer at Franciscan Alliance, quoted in the study. "Every time you add a new environment, it increases the complexity of how you share and protect data and ensures only the appropriate data goes from one environment to another."

Educating the business is a vital piece of an effective strategy. The Harvard Business Review report describes how Chegg, an educational technology and information publisher, has been rearchitecting its cloud approach over the past year to create smaller, more flexible cloud accounts for use by its engineering teams. "We've been in cloud for so long, we've learned a lot of what's working and what isn't working," John Heasman, chief information security officer, is quoted in the study. "We ended up in a position where we needed to take a step back and look at our architecture to align with best practices in cloud infrastructure and improve our processes overall."

Heasman and his team concentrated on educating the company's leaders on the ways its cloud strategy will result in new services. "It's not just a case of saying, 'Here's a new account. It's yours,'" Heasman says. "It required a lot of planning to ensure the right level of oversight while still enabling our team to get the full benefit of cloud-native technology."

It's notable that hybrid on-premises/cloud environments will be the dominant mode for some to come. Eighty-five percent of respondents say their organization has a hybrid cloud environment today -- and 88% of those respondents anticipate that their organization will maintain a hybrid cloud approach for the foreseeable future.

In the unprecedented 2020-21 push to cloud, the dearth of talent to manage hybrid environments became the number-one hot-button issue. Here are the top issues that have arisen:

Again, many of these issues will fall to IT teams to address -- and cannot be effectively outsourced to cloud providers. The survey finds only 21% of IT executives strongly agree that their cloud vendors provide all the necessary tools and processes to manage and optimize their cloud environments, while 42% somewhat agree. "Cloud vendors will always oversell the value of cloud technology," according to Bhat -- especially when talking to non-tech business leaders. "The technology is just one piece of the puzzle," he says. "In order to get the value from it, you have to put the right people and processes in place and engage in the process of rolling out new functionality, testing it, and changing your business processes. Without that, you lose all the value of moving to the cloud."

See the article here:
Rush to cloud computing is outpacing organizations' ability to adapt - ZDNet

A CloudBolt Software survey of 500 senior IT, DevOps, security and finance leaders found 79% are struggling under the weight of managing multiple cloud computing environments.

The survey from CloudBolt Software, a provider of a cloud management platform, found specifically that more than three-quarters of respondents (78%) said they have too many cloud tools throughout their enterprise, and 80% struggled to achieve comprehensive visibility into cloud usage and spending. A total of 80% also noted that their current approach to cloud computing created new security vulnerabilities.

A full 88% said they need a manager of managers that would enable them to unify the various silos that have multiplied across their IT environment.

Nevertheless, 78% of respondents said that moving to the cloud enabled them to achieve cost savings compared to running applications in an on-premises IT environment.

CloudBolt Software CEO Jeff Kukowski said the issue is not so much that IT organizations regret shifting workloads to the cloud; instead, the issue is finding a way to manage multiple clouds, each with their own set of tools and frameworks that need to be mastered.

Its not clear whether organizations are deliberately employing multiple clouds or if, because of simple inertia, they have found themselves managing multiple cloud platforms because of decisions made by various development teams. Some IT organizations, for example, employ multiple clouds because they are concerned about either becoming locked into a specific cloud computing service or whether an outage might take all their applications offline at the same time. Others are simply trying to take advantage of services that are better provided by one vendor than another.

Regardless of how IT organizations found themselves managing multiple clouds, the total cost of IT rises as each new platform is added to an IT environment. CloudBolt Software is making a case for an IT framework that provides a layer of abstraction through which the management of multiple clouds and on-premises IT environments can be unified. It is more a question of time and degree to which IT organizations will eventually consolidate the management of disparate IT environments under a single control plane that provides the foundation for true hybrid cloud computing, said Kukowski.

There are, of course, a few organizations that have standardized on a single cloud computing platform. The degree to which those organizations can maintain that standard will naturally vary as, for example, new workloads that may be optimized for a specific cloud environment are built or as companies acquire other organizations that are running workloads on other cloud platforms. In many of those cases, organizations discover that the cloud services invoked expose a range of proprietary application programming interfaces (APIs) and disparate virtual machines that make migrating workloads a major challenge.

Like it or not, most organizations will be managing multiple IT environments for the foreseeable future. The only thing that is uncertain is the volume of workloads that might be running on any one of those platforms at any given time.

Continue reading here:
Multi-Cloud Computing is a Major IT Headache - DevOps.com

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has released a tool that helps customers see how much carbon dioxide (CO2) their use ofcloud-computing services releases.

AWS has launched the free Customer Carbon Footprint Tool to help its customers understand the carbon emissions their EC2 instances and other compute and networking services are generating.

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The reports detail the emissions used in commercial AWS regions and is calculated monthly. AWS notes there is a three-month delay to its reporting due to "the underlying billing cycle of the electric utilities that supply us with power."

SEE: Most eco-friendly smartphone? Apple vs Samsung in the race against e-waste

The tool can be opened from the AWS Billing Console after clicking the "Cost & Usage Reports" section from the menu. The Customer Carbon Footprint Tool provides a summary of emissions across regions through services including EC2 and its S3 storage service. All measurements are provided in Metric Tons of Carbon Dioxide Equivalent (MTCO2e).

AWS's new tool adds to the trend among tech firms to boost and measure how much their services are impacting the environment. AWS's new tool comes just after Salesforce and Google announced general availability of Net Zero Cloud 2.0 to help customers become "net zero" in a carbon output sense.

In 2020,Microsoft joined the Amazon co-founded The Climate Pledge, which aims to achieve net-zero carbon across its businesses by 2040, 10 years ahead of the Paris Agreement target.

While large-scale data centers operated by Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook do consume a lot of energy, they can also be more efficient than traditional data centers. IDC estimates that between 2021 and 2024, the shift to cloud computing should prevent at least 629 million metric tons of CO2 emissions.

AWS notes that it can help customers lower their carbon footprint by 88% compared to standard enterprise data centers, according to a study it commissioned from 451 Research.

AWS is also backing the programming language Rust to reduce energy consumption through more efficient code. Datacenters make up 1% of the world's energy consumption, amounting to about 200 terawatt hours of energy a day. AWS engineers cite research showing that broad adoption of C and Rust could at least half computing energy consumption.

Most Big Tech companies are aiming to reduce their carbon emissions. IBM plans to achievenet-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 while Microsoft says itsentire supply chain would be negative by 2030. Facebook claims it willreach net-zero CO2 emissions by 2030. Google has been carbon neutral since 2007, and it's aiming torun its whole business carbon free by 2030. Apple wants itself and itssupply chain to be carbon neutral by 2030.

Microsoft yesterday launched a new sustainability industry team to power its efforts, which is being led by former Shell executive Elisabeth Brinton. She'll work closely with Microsoft's chief environmental officer, Lucas Joppa, according to aLinkedIn post from Microsoft.

Read more here:
This new AWS tool shows customers the carbon footprint of their cloud-computing usage - ZDNet

KARACHI: A global tech giant SAP has announced to leverage cloud computing technology in Pakistan as part of its plans for 2022, The News learnt on Friday.

The facility would help organisations reduce complexity, optimise costs, enable real-time decision making, and support new digital business innovation, SAP informed.

The decision has been taken to support and accelerate digital transformation in the country, announced Saquib Ahmad, managing director SAP Pakistan, during a media session organised at a local hotel in Karachi.

Cloud computing, which involves delivering hosted services over the internet, is recognised as a core technological building block for digital innovation, and businesses prefer adopting a cloud-first strategy in their IT operations.

Talking about SAPs existing portfolio for the promotion of cloud strategy across public and private sectors, Ahmad explained how SAPs cloud offerings enable companies optimise their end-to-end processes and innovate with new capabilities in the cloud, while reducing operating costs, improving productivity, and unlocking new opportunities for growth.

He further underscored SAPs plans to increase its efforts to provide better online security for its clients, highlighting security as one of the persistent issues organisations face in an online world.

Read more from the original source:
SAP to offer cloud computing - The News International