Survey: Enterprises Lack Visibility Into Public Clouds
Public cloud adoption continues to surge, but not all adopters are seeing an immediate return on the investment, an industry survey concludes.
In a survey of more than 1,600 IT professionals designed to discern public cloud adoption trends, cloud monitoring software vendor ScienceLogic found that 83 percent of organizations polled in late September said they plan to expand cloud adoption over the next year. Of those, 62 percent are already shifting workloads to public clouds.
A majority of respondents estimated that at least 25 percent of their IT resources are hosted on public clouds while 20 percent reported that half of their infrastructure resides in public clouds.
The survey also confirmed that Amazon Web Services (NASDAQ:AMZN) remains the most popular public cloud provider, preferred by 58 percent of respondents. Microsoft Azure (NASDAQ: MSFT) was the No. 2 cloud vendor with 43 percent followed by Google Cloud platform with 13 percent.
ScienceLogic, Reston, Va., said Thursday (Nov. 5) its cloud survey also uncovered lingering concerns about a lack of visibility into public cloud infrastructure—the very same service the company offers. The survey found that 82 percent of respondents said they are unable to ensure "optimum performance, health and availability of public cloud workloads due to a lack of visibility into the public cloud infrastructure."
Nearly half of respondents reported they either do not or do not know how to "proactively" monitor workloads running on public clouds. Hence, nearly two-thirds of those companies surveyed acknowledged having less control over their cloud-based IT infrastructure.
That uncertainty has fueled wider adoption of hybrid cloud infrastructure in which mission-critical workloads like revenue-generating transaction processing tend to remain running on-premise or in private clouds.
Public cloud outages tend to attract as much attention within enterprises as do service interruptions on big social media sites like Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) and Twitter (NYSE: TWTR). The ScienceLogic survey found that companies experienced on average about four network outages per year, resulting in an average loss of $3.9 million annually. Half of respondents said they have experienced a complete network outage over the past 12 months.
The hybrid IT monitoring vendor must be on to something since it has raised $84 million in venture funding during four investment rounds, according to the web site crunchbase.com. Its latest funding round in February 2015 raised $43 million. Lead investors include Goldman Sachs and Intel Capital.
The company offers monitoring services for AWS, Microsoft Azure and private clouds as well as tools for tracking the performance of virtual, physical and converged infrastructure.
ScienceLogic announced a partnership this week with Viavi Solutions (NASDAQ: VIAV), another infrastructure monitoring vendor, designed to help manage workload performance across hybrid cloud infrastructure. The partners said their new monitoring tools would provide real-time snap shots of on-premise and cloud networking, computing and storage resources.
