Top CloudOps Challenges and the Impact to Digital Transformation
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Leading enterprises in different industries utilize CloudOps as a core part of their operations. This is thanks to the agility, risk mitigation, automated security, and downtime management that moving to the cloud can provide. However, moving to the Cloud does come with its fair share of challenges.
Let’s examine some of the top CloudOps challenges and how they impact digital transformation.
1. Complexity
Large enterprises typically adopt Cloud to make things easier and more efficient for their organization. Such arrangement allows the Cloud service provider to take care of the heavy lifting and allow the enterprise’s IT team to take care of other more-localized matters. However, more and more organizations are subscribing to numerous cloud providers for various purposes, as well as running private clouds, complicating cloud adoption and the management process.
This has introduced complexity to today’s operations teams. Enterprises who make these decisions will need access to skilled professionals who possess the knowledge and expertise to maintain CloudOps teams and procedures in complex environments to reap the benefits they seek.
2. Vendor Planning
On the opposite end of things, enterprises may delegate all their cloud needs to a single cloud provider for the sake of simplicity. This may seem advantageous at first, especially if the cloud provider offers scalability solutions to meet the growing enterprise’s IT needs. However, if the enterprise decides to move to a different cloud provider in the future, they may find it difficult to migrate their data and cloud operations to the new cloud provider.
As a result, the enterprise will feel “locked-in” with their existing vendor and be dependent on them for much longer than initially anticipated. This can be disastrous for large enterprises with a growing need for additional Cloud services that their existing vendor cannot provide.
The enterprise's CloudOps teams will therefore need to plan for vendor selection well in advance and think about the organization’s future needs. Failing to account for these future needs may negatively impact Digital Transformation initiatives and can lead to other enterprise operations being disrupted.
3. Lack of Staff with CloudOps Skills
Managing CloudOps, especially in a multi-cloud environment, requires specialized knowledge that the IT staff at large enterprises may not necessarily possess. This includes knowledge in areas such as:
- Programming
- Database management
- Artificial intelligence and machine learning
- Serverless architecture
- Hybrid cloud
- Configuration & change management
Enterprises that do not possess staff with the aforementioned knowledge won’t be able to maintain in-house CloudOps. They will therefore need to rely on managed service providers who offer such solutions instead.
4. This could be undesirable for large firms that prefer having complete control of CloudOps via in-house teams. Some companies have responded to this problem by investing in staff training to help them gain these much-needed skills. Vulnerability to Security and Threats
Cloud environments are vulnerable to many types of security threats. Enterprise CloudOps teams might not be able to handle these threats adequately if they aren’t well prepared.
For example, the CloudOps team may fail to design and implement security protocols to prevent unauthorized users from getting physical access to cloud servers. Additionally, with multiple clouds comes additional attack surfaces to target.
Large enterprises will therefore need to collaborate with SECOps and additionally monitor their systems carefully to keep an eye out for security threats and any configuration changes. A platform such as Evolven can help them track of such changes and take action before they impact operations.
5. Budgeting
Enterprises often allocate static budgets to their CloudOps. However, this can lead to many problems down the line, especially if the budget was created without using a proper cost management plan.
Lack of visibility into CloudOps spending practices can also be a prominent issue. Enterprises rarely have the tools to determine their cloud spending needs. As a result, they are often hit with hidden costs that cause them to exceed their initial budget.
On the opposite end, CloudOps teams can also misinterpret cloud cost reports and end up overspending on services. Enterprises can overcome such issues using tools that offer better visibility and provide greater insight into cloud expenditures.
6. Failing to Understand Dependencies
CloudOps teams must have a firm understanding of application dependencies before attempting to perform different cloud operations. The vast majority of an organization’s existing applications are likely to rely on other applications in their IT environment. Therefore, enterprises will need to understand the different connections and dependencies between these applications before carrying out any major operations such as cloud migration.
This is easier said than done. Mapping out the aforementioned relationships can be difficult due to the cloud's rapidly evolving environment. Therefore, CloudOps teams must be trained to understand the cloud environment how to perform this mapping manually.
In other cases, the enterprise’s CloudOps team can use automated methods to perform this mapping with the help of specialized tools.
7. Not Harnessing Data Effectively
Many enterprises embrace the Cloud for the upfront benefits it offer such as better scalability, easier automation, and fewer required resources. However, this is still barely scratching the surface of what effective Cloud implementation can provide.
When done correctly, the data obtained from cloud technology can deliver special insights for enterprises seeking to innovate. Analyzing such data may help the organization improve customer engagement, improve uptimes, streamline operations, and increase employee productivity.
Collecting such data is just the first step in generating all these benefits. Many Organizations fail to analyze their operational data that can further streamline the business. This makes their operations more complex and drives up costs without the value boost they would receive if they had leveraged the data correctly.
Evolven unifies operational data across multi-cloud environments, as well as legacy on-premises environments. This one source of truth provides makes sure that IT (CloudOps, DevOps, and ITOps) always knows the state of its environment, always understands the risk of planned changes, and always knows the root cause of issues when they do occur.
How CloudOps Challenges are Impacting Digital Transformation
As you can see, CloudOps comes with no shortage of challenges. Such challenges make many enterprises hesitant to embrace cloud technology despite the numerous benefits it offers.
Migrating to the cloud does require plenty of planning and refinement before taking on your transformation, however it is not impossible to be successful and reap all the benefits promised by the cloud.
Possible Solutions for Cloud and CloudOps Challenges
We said it was not impossible but not that it was easy. There are no easy solutions to these challenges. However, there are some ways to mitigate their severity and impact on operations.
For example, enterprises can focus on choosing the right Cloud vendors to assist with their Digital Transformation, cloud migration and therefore how they must manage CloudOps. Such vendors should maintain a high level of security and monitor their cloud environments regularly. Or they must hire experienced staff to ensure the same.
Organizations can also benefit by spending time and resources on planning for the Cloud and how CloudOps should be addressed. An in-depth plan will help different departments understand the challenges they will face and plan for them beforehand. This may help reduce budgeting issues or application dependency problems that may arise in the future.
Enterprises with growing CloudOps can also rely on third-party governance tools such as Evolven to keep monitoring the environment state, configuration risk and changes to their holistic environments, knowing that instabilities, security issues and non-compliance will occur in the future. This enables CloudOps teams (DevOps and ITOps) to stay on top of controlling their enterprise’s data and applications in their cloud and on-premises environments.
How Evolven Can Help Address CloudOps Challenges
Evolven is an innovative tool that allows enterprises to monitor all configuration changes made to their end-to-end hybrid, multicloud environment. It employs machine learning to analyze such changes and correlates them with data obtained from cloud management tools, CI/CD, and DevOps to assess their risk to prevent issues from taking place.
Having a tool such as Evolven by your side enables your CloudOps and DevOps teams to better-manage the cloud environment and foresee potential issues that may disrupt your operations or production releases in the future. It can help streamline your operations by providing transparency, which makes it useful for both planning and mitigating cloud issues.
When utilized properly, Evolven can help address many of the CloudOps challenges described above and help your enterprise succeed in all your goals for digital transformation.
Please contact us to learn more about Evolven and how it can help your enterprise.
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