Cloud computing has been increasingly favoured over on-premise computing lately. A majority of IT industry players right from hardware manufacturers, OS, and middleware software developers to independent software vendors (ISVs) have embraced cloud.

A recently published IDG’s Enterprise Cloud Computing Survey (2016) indicates that by 2018 the typical IT department will have at least 60% of their apps and platforms hosted on the cloud.

Future of IT Platform is Cloud

Despite adoption, however, there are a lot of barriers to its adoption and acceleration. Another industry report indicates that 60% of engineering firms are slowing down their cloud adoption plans due to lack of security skills.

Skills gap is considered to be one of the major pet peeve of cloud practitioners across the globe. Apart from this challenge there are other barriers to the cloud adoption too. Just because there are challenges one must not stop there and hinder progress. The buck must not stop there. Why not turn these obstacles into opportunities and problems into possibilities?

As a cloud user, do you want to know the top pet peeves of a cloud practitioner and turn them into possibilities or opportunities? If yes, then you are at the right place. Read on these challenges collected from several cloud experts via an internal survey:

Apprehensions about Losing Control and Visibility over Data

Storing sensitive and proprietary data on external environment carries risks. Despite cloud providers providing successful case studies and guides for best practices, enterprise bureaucrats are still apprehensive about moving their data to the cloud. Because it becomes very difficult to see where the data resides exactly once it is on a public cloud.

The other perspective: If data is stored in the cloud, you can access it from anywhere, anytime, no matter what happens to your machine. Plus, you can have complete control over your data and even remotely erase data if you’re in doubt that it is in the wrong hands. Cloud providers also have fine grained Identity and Access Management (IAM) controls. Moreover, there are many competitive SaaS platforms that bring data security tools integrated with other DevOps features so that cloud users don’t have to worry about losing control over their sensitive data sets.

Lesser Visibility and Control over Operations Compared to On-Prem IT Infra

A majority of businesses want to track the changes that are made during the IT operations. So, they are worried that there might not be complete visibility into their IT operations such as who is accessing what and when, like in on-prem IT infra.

The other perspective: It is a myth that cloud does not provide complete visibility and control. It provides complete visibility and control to the user, provided you have all authenticated access to it. Further, adopting DevOps platforms and tool chain such as Docker, Ansible etc. can empower enterprise teams to track and manage the entire Application development and deployment lifecycle.

Fear of Bill Shock

Cloud Services are priced entirely different from the simple fixed price models of standard servers in a data center. Budgeting and managing frequent cost changes in the cloud scenario is worrisome for most businesses, because the complex pricing model of the cloud get them overworked or overwhelmed.

The other perspective: Cloud goes with Opex, not Capex. With a well designed cloud architecture, along with a comprehensive cloud management plan, can always keep cloud cost under control and optimized. No bill shock, to be precise! Good news is that there are several SaaS-based CloudOps solutions that integrate natively with the Core Cloud Platform leveraging the Open APIs. They can dynamically provision and decommission system resources based on dynamic parameters like workloads, user traffic, etc. By optimizing the resource utilization, these CloudOps platforms can bring down the operational costs drastically. Additionally, these platforms feature advanced dashboards that can help companies to establish budgetary controls and track the actual cost accruals against the planned costs. Such tools can help enterprises overcome the fear of costs overshooting.

Acquiring New Skillset for Cloud Management

Cloud platforms have radically altered the application development lifecycle automation and continue to do so with emerging cutting-edge technologies. To that end, businesses have to continually acquire DevOps teams adept with all the new emerging technologies, essentially to manage the cloud servers over the different lifecycle stages such as PoC, test, staging, and production.

The other perspective: Instead of hiring a team of engineers for Ops why not just automate known IT ops using tools and just focus on development? The skills shortage always seems like a problem across the industry. Moreover, cloudOps automation platforms like Botmetric can help the technology complexity underneath the Cloud by automating many of the frequent tasks that are expected to be performed.

The Bottom Line: Many CloudOps Platforms and Tools to the Rescue

Several third party software vendors have ventured to fill the gaps in the core cloud platforms and solve most of the concerns voiced by the cloud users. As a Cloud Expert one should be knowledgeable about these extension tools to bridge the gap between the Cloud platforms capabilities and Enterprise teams’ needs.

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