With recent studies suggesting that around 90% of businesses utilize the cloud in some sort of way, it is safe to say it is a trend that is here to stay. However, purchasing a cloud service is only part of the journey to fully integrate it over the long-term. It also needs to be maintained so the cloud can stay instrumental to a business’ operations.
A recent survey, conducted by an IT vendor, sought to further study this growing issue. It found that nearly 50% of corporate IT decision makers believe that their company is not prepared to address the challenges of their cloud service 5 years out.
Cloud Management Today
As the cloud service market continues its rapid maturation process, many of the larger vendors are selling products that have at least one thing in common: simplicity. The platforms themselves tout simplified infrastructure management that can be deployed immediately with built-in tools to make common maintenance tasks easier for end-users.
However, cloud management platforms that promise of simplicity does not mean no infrastructure maintenance is required. Currently, this failure of distinction is all too common with corporate management. This widespread issue only contributes to the statistic, found via the aforementioned survey, that stated 80% of IT decision makers feel that leadership underestimates the cost and effort of managing cloud systems. This statistic leads to the unintended consequence of understaffing and a general lack of resources that an IT department needs to succeed in a cloud environment.
IT’s Increasing Workload
Overall, there is a convergence of issues and pressures on corporate IT departments. As previously mentioned, a lack of cloud management planning, insufficient cloud expertise, and an increasing pressure to spin up infrastructure in a fast and reliable manner is rampant across the corporate world. Therefore, IT is struggling to keep up. This is extremely problematic for cloud adoption because this struggle can lead to cloud projects faltering or stagnating after the first wave of data migration.
The previously mentioned vendor concluded by detailing two answers to this issue: automation and supplementing an internal IT team with outside experts.
Automation can be a very effective method of managing the day-to-day cloud maintenance tasks. However, implementing these processes can be an arduous task as well. The same survey discussed before stated that 54% of respondents couldn’t find good DevOps talent to further automate their cloud deployments. This leaves end-users with the more pragmatic answer: outside experts.
RapidScale: Your Outside Expert
RapidScale offers a solution to the issues described above and that is through managed services. A managed cloud service is an arrangement allowing the customer to subscribe to the desired solution. RapidScale then deploys the service and can act as a dedicated IT team to the client, staying involved as long as the business desires.
RapidScale management includes end-user troubleshooting and device setup, operating system management, 100% SLA, licensing management, application management, patches and upgrades to a server, managed backups, 24x7x365 support and more.
A managed cloud is a better solution if a business does not have a solid IT team or is uncomfortable with the full deployment of cloud and software. A business then can focus on harnessing the power of the cloud without worrying about the cost, stress or time it takes to manage it.
