Organizations need tools to manage their infrastructure, which today is expanding beyond the data center to include multiple public clouds. In fact, in a recent survey of hybrid cloud decision makers, we found that the vast majority of respondents (88%) have placed more than one-quarter of their workloads in the public cloud, and 44% indicated that they’re running more than half of their workloads in the public cloud. Furthermore, organizations aren’t limiting themselves to just one public cloud provider. A full 84% of respondents said they have deployed workloads in more than one public cloud, making multi-cloud the norm. This vastly expands the estate that IT needs to manage.
These teams, however, are struggling. The problem isn’t that they don’t have enough tools. Quite the opposite, in fact—they have too many. This is not a new issue. Tool sprawl has been eating into IT efficiency for years. However, the results of this survey show that the problem is accelerating.
Hybrid multi-cloud has a tools problem
We asked respondents with multi-cloud deployments to characterize their operational abilities. Only 36% said they have comprehensive, unified visibility and management capabilities across all their public clouds. Less than one-quarter (23%) stated they have comprehensive visibility but it’s “view only” and management is still siloed. Another 21% said they try to stitch together key information about their different clouds but it’s a manual process and provides an incomplete view, and 19% reported that each public cloud they use operates as its own silo and they don’t have a consolidated view or tools to manage across cloud platforms.
Similarly, when asked about their approach to getting a global view of cloud costs, only 34% stated they have one streamlined approach. A far greater number—62%—said they have a lot of different tools/systems/programs in place.
What does this mean for all those enterprises who are cobbling disparate components together? Big headaches and lots of work, it turns out. While 30% said the process is completely automated, the rest must put in some level of effort. One-quarter (26%) stated that it’s fairly easy (though even if it’s not difficult, that’s time you don’t have to spend elsewhere), 27% say it takes some effort, and 15% say it’s a complex and heavy lift.
This can affect how quickly organizations get an up-to-date global view of cloud costs. Only 14% said they can do so in minutes. For the rest, it takes hours (46%), days (27%), or weeks to months (13%). Compounding the problem is that when you stitch tools and processes together, you create potential points of failure. This happens 100% of the time—not one respondent said they’d never experienced data issues in the process—and 83% said it happens more than rarely. In fact, it occurs occasionally (it happens, but not often) for 26% of respondents, frequently (more often than not) for 28%, and constantly (almost every time) for 29%. If you’re among the vast majority dealing with such data issues on a regular basis, you’re going to have to spend a good bit of time troubleshooting problems—and how confident can you really be that you’re getting an accurate view of your global cloud costs?
It should come as no surprise, then, that 72% of respondents stated they are fed up with piecing together data from multiple IT operations management tools.
The solution: a unified platform
You don’t have to throw out all your tools and start from scratch. Not only is that impractical, but many of those tools likely provide some value to your organization within a defined sphere of activity. Cobbling them together, however, often creates extra work and potential for error, and you usually end up with a whole that’s less than the sum of its parts. Instead of trying to turn point tools into something they’re not, why not select a unified platform for managing your entire IT infrastructure across on-premises, public cloud, and hybrid cloud deployments? With Virtana Platform, you gain precision observability via the combination of AIOps, machine learning, and data-driven analytics for migrating, optimizing, and monitoring across the entire hybrid cloud infrastructure. Request a free trial today!
Get the survey report: State of Hybrid Cloud and FinOps survey
Try it for free: Virtana Platform
Randy Randhawa
