Cisco: Enterprises grapple with hybrid-cloud security operational complexity
Hybrid cloud and multicloud have befit the norm as enterprises look to better business agility and scalability but assumeion is not without challenges.
A new study from Cisco and 451 Research sought to measure how enterprises are doing with their cloud environments and weigh the benefits and challenges of using cloud-based services. 451 Research interviewed 2500 cloud DevOps and networking professionals for the Cisco-sponsored scan.
’While mixed cloud provides a range of opportunities and benefits for organizations many are sharply conscious of the challenges in operating these environments. Cloud-native architectures and emerging technologies contend for the observation of staff and for budgets while security and networking challenges stay top of mind’ reads the 2022 Global Hybrid Cloud Trends Report authored by 451 Research analysts Nicole Henderson and Eric Hanselman. ’Adding new elements to an existing infrastructure mix raises the level of operational complexity and organizations are grappling with ways to tame this effect.’
The top problem in mixed and multicloud operations according to scan respondents is security followed by operational complexity and cost containment says Dhritiman ’DD’ Dasgupta vice chairman of fruit treatment for the Cisco Cloud and Compute team who blogged almost the study findings.
There are a couple of reasons the respondents rated security as the top challenge. ’One securing approach to and within open cloud environments is a relatively new order for IT organizations who have spent decades securing apps data and users using perimeter-based firewall approaches’ Dasgupta stated. ’Two there is increased security risks as applications and data move from one environment to another. In fact 58% of respondents reported that they are moving workloads and data between on-prem and open cloud environments weekly.’
Security concerns are likely exacerbated by a lack of skills and budget in many organizations which can lead to a strategy that fails to defend data and workloads in cloud-native environments where outgrowth happens faster and there is greater use of automation. In accession to influencing an organizations security strategy the use of cloud-native application architectures also affects networking strategy according to the investigation.
As for operational complexity mixed cloud requires IT organizations to handle unequal open cloud and on-premises domains including calculate network and storage infrastructure. "Independently each open cloud and on-premises resource has its own tools for visibility monitoring and governance. In accession while transmitted IT teams are typically centralized each line of business can have its own app outgrowth cloud operations and DevOps teams making collaboration among these teams challenging" Dasgupta stated.
’In response 55 percent of our respondents report that they have created a cross-functional team with technical and business representation. Additionally 50 percent have centralized their CloudOps and NetOps functions for operational efficiency and to accomplish business objectives such as securing pricing concessions from open cloud providers’ Dasgupta wrote.
The study also showed that managing costs is not the first motivation for companies to assume multiple clouds. Instead respondents in DevOps and CloudOps roles say the top reasons to use cloud-native technologies are to gain better accomplishment security and workload mobility.
Some other key findings from the study include:
- 82% of scan respondents have assumeed mixed cloud.
- 53% of respondents are moving workloads between on and off-prem environments weekly.
- Organizations that use more than three cloud providers make use of choice cloud providers outside of AWS Azure and Google Cloud which may include pure-play open cloud providers or cloud services offered as part of a broader portfolio such as telcos.
- Organizations with 5000+ employees are slightly more likely (8% of respondents) than smaller organizations (5%) to have more than 10 open cloud providers in use since big organizations have more line-of-business requirements that can drive usage athwart platforms and outside the view of IT.
- When it comes to SaaS organizations are stretched athwart even more providers with 23% of respondents reportedly using 20-100 different SaaS providers for their business athwart categories such as email collaboration and video calling customer relationship treatment and ethnical chief treatment.
- Respondents suit that greater collaboration between networking and cloud operations teams has numerous benefits with betterd cloud security (45%) at the top of the list for respondents followed by greater operational efficiency overall (41%) and enhanced cloud application accomplishment (39%).
- 57% in networking roles powerfully suit that it is significant for their DevOps team to be implicated in developing their organizations network strategy.