By this point, most companies have become familiar with cloud and included it as an integral component of their IT strategy. Despite their increased experience with cloud, many companies continue to face challenges that prevent them from gaining the maximum benefit from cloud. These challenges include:
1. Cloud complexity.
Cloud comes in many flavors and is built on many underlying technologies. Businesses often end up with multiple cloud providers, multiple types of clouds, and an architecture that limits visibility and makes management oversight difficult.
2. Security.
Security remains a major concern around deployments in the cloud. Oversights and configuration mistakes accidentally make sensitive data publicly accessible.
3. Cloud costs.
The pay-per-use benefit of cloud sometimes disappears as cloud usage grows. Properly sizing instances, choosing correct storage tiers, and leveraging reserved or spot availability effectively to control costs require deep understanding of usage patterns.
4. Compliance and governance.
Self-service and shadow IT in the cloud both make it difficult for compliance teams to track and monitor data usage in the cloud.
5. Private and hybrid architectures.
Deciding whether to build a private or hybrid cloud, and then implementing it effectively, remains difficult despite newer tools to bring cloud into the data center.
6. Performance.
Loads on the network, both public and within the cloud provider’s facilities, can impact the performance end users experience. Deploying systems regionally to bring systems closer to users can help, but can also impact costs and management.
7. Vendor lock-in.
Although multicloud is sometimes seen as a solution to cloud vendor lock in, systems are rarely portable across clouds, unless they’re designed to take no advantage of cloud-specific features. In effect, multicloud often results in multi-vendor lock-ins.
8. Availability and reliability.
Although cloud is highly robust, businesses still need to implement their own disaster recover strategies to handle cloud failures.
9. Migration models.
Lift and shift gets companies to the cloud faster, but often doesn’t position them to take best advantage of cloud features. Delaying refactoring until after an application is in the cloud can result in effectively migrating the workload twice.
Businesses that are struggling to overcome these cloud challenges need support from an organization with deep experience in the cloud, like VAST IT Services. Our team provides support for multiple cloud models and multiple cloud providers at every stage of the cloud journey. Contact VAST IT Services to learn how we can help you make the first step to cloud or successfully tackle the challenges that come once you’re already there.
