Cloud Sprawl Has Midsize Businesses Looking for New Management Tools
April 17, 2012
The IT landscape is currently dominated by a single albeit misunderstood revolutionary force–cloud computing. Experts agree that cloud solutions are the likely future of the market and that the function of IT professionals will be altered at a fundamental level and their role in crucial business decisions increased as cloud technology becomes more robust. But along with the potential for significant games comes the specter of what is known as "cloud sprawl"–unrestrained growth of a public or private cloud without clear direction or control by the company that owns the data. Now, midsized businesses are looking for ways to stay in charge without sacrificing the agility of cloud solutions.
On the Way Up
According to a recent Techworld article, the number of enterprise and midmarket companies using public cloud infrastructe-as-a-service (IaaS)–to cite just one example of cloud adoption–is on the rise. In a 2011 survey, only 17 percent of respondents said that they were using these services, but that number has now jumped to 27 percent. Twenty-four percent of those asked said they had plans to implement a cloud solution at some point during 2012, but the numbers aren’t all on the upside; while Gartner’s Lydia Leong says, "Public cloud IaaS is rapidly becoming an accepted technology approach to doing business," 28 percent of midsized and enterprise businesses have no plans to head skyward just yet…
Why? In part because of cloud sprawl. Companies that have watched cloud technology evolve have also seen the mistakes made by early adopters. Paul Burns, the founder of cloud computing firm Neovise, says "CIOs are now telling their teams to get a public cloud strategy in place and roll it all the way down to the workloads where it makes sense. Planning helps contain cloud sprawl." Rather than rushing into deals with cloud providers, companies are instead taking their time and looking for plans and programs that support careful adoption of the cloud in order to maximize bottom-line effectiveness.
New Cloud Solutions
A number of providers are now developing solutions to help IT admins better manage their borderless data with the same confidence as if it were in their own local server stacks. Tech giant IBM, for example, recently released its SmartCloud Control Desk V7.5. The software aims to limit cloud sprawl and increase IT control by providing a single point of contact for all cloud functions in a system.
IBM isn’t the only company trying to entice users with management apps. VMware recently released BOSH, its new management and deployment framework, while cloud management service RightScale hopes to woo IT departments by offering support for the soon-to-be-deployed HP cloud.
It’s clear that cloud viability is no longer the issue and the "age of the cloud" is rapidly approaching. Instead of pure power, midsize and enterprise businesses are now looking for ways to rein in the unnecessary sprawl of data and to monitor crucial aspects of their cloud presence. New tools from IBM and other enterprise-level cloud companies look to develop simple management tools and provide a familiar sense of control for IT.