According to recent studies, the main cloud challenges enterprises will face during 2022 include security, governance, compliance, finance and talent. Here, we take a closer look at the state of today’s enterprise cloud environment and give insights into these and other challenges.
Top challenges
Research shows that enterprises face eight major cloud challenges overall. In order of the number of respondents citing them, these were security (81%), managing finance (79%), governance (75%), lack of expertise (75%), compliance (75%), managing BYOL (73%), managing multi-cloud (72%) and cloud migration (71%). Noticeably, the figures for enterprises were higher in all areas than for SMBs.
The studies indicate that while companies have growing cloud experience, the adoption of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies, together with an increase in cloud-based workloads still presents significant security, finance and governance challenges. And while managing multi-cloud/hybrid environments becomes easier as companies gain experience, ongoing changes (e.g., new regulations and emerging security threats) mean challenges with security, finance, governance and compliance remain constant.
How cloud maturity affects challenge
There are interesting differences in the challenges faced by enterprises that have recently become cloud users and those that can be considered as cloud-mature. For newcomers, the four biggest challenges cited by respondents were, in order, governance (79%), lack of expertise (78%), migration (77%) and security (76%). For cloud-mature enterprises, they were managing finance (81%), security (81%), governance (75%) and compliance (75%). For intermediate companies (those neither a newcomer nor mature) lack of expertise (87%) and security (86%) were, by some margin, cited as the major challenges.
Financial challenges
Enterprises face a number of financial management challenges, with the struggle to forecast the cost of their growing cloud use the chief cause of concern. Cloud spending is rising rapidly and enterprises, on average, overspent cloud budgets by a quarter in 2021. And with spending expected to increase by around 40% in 2022, enterprises need to get a firm grip on forecasting. Optimising costs is also vital, with an estimated 35% of all cloud spend being wasted and too many organisations lacking a clear understanding of the often-complex cloud pricing structures.
Software costs are another financial challenge for companies, with many organisations not fully understanding the implications of software licences and licence compliance. Additionally, the lack of understanding of the type of software that is used, available or compatible in the cloud means companies can waste budgets unnecessarily.
While most organisations have policies in place to optimise costs and manage cloud spending, the majority of these are still carried out manually rather than being automated. Less than 40% of enterprises have automated policies in place to manage the use of low-cost cloud and licence compliance or to eliminate unused storage and make greater use of discounts. Indeed, less than half even automate the shutting down of workloads after use.
Expertise challenges
One of the major expertise challenges faced by enterprises in 2022 is with containers. The use of containers has now become ubiquitous across the cloud, with over half of all respondents using Docker, AWS and Kubernetes already, and 75% planning to use these in the future. Expertise is needed in this area to migrate traditional apps to micro-services optimised containers and to ensure security.
However, with only a limited number of container experts in the jobs market, this is going to become increasingly problematic as more enterprises adopt containers. According to the latest research, around three-quarters of companies see lack of talent as an issue.
More challenge as public cloud use continues to grow
Enterprises are continually increasing their use of the public cloud, not just to run workloads but to experiment before potential use. The challenges mentioned above will, therefore, undoubtedly continue with this growth.
Today, enterprises are using a wider range of cloud vendors in their multi-clouds, with many shifting workloads from one vendor to another. The cloud services that are used the most by enterprises are data warehousing (54%), relational database as a service (50%), container as a service (49%), NoSQL database as a service (47%) and push notifications (45%). Other important uses include caching, batch processing, search, mobile services and machine learning.
While these figures illustrate current use, when those experimenting with services and those planning to use are added, the figures are much higher across the board. Data warehousing, for example, rises from 54% to 87%, indicating how popular such a service will become in the near future.
Conclusion
The growing use of the cloud, its ongoing technological development and the need to manage spending, governance, compliance and security present enterprises with a wide range of challenges. From reading this article you should now have a better understanding of what the current major challenges are and how they differ for enterprises of varying cloud maturity. Working closely with an experienced partner, like Hyperslice, that has considerable expertise in delivering enterprise cloud solutions, can ensure you overcome these challenges and have the cloud services your business needs. For more information, visit Hyperslice.com
