The cloud computing industry rolls along at a staggering pace. So much so that one of the biggest issues currently affecting adoptees is the speed at which it expands.
It may sound like a badly made ’90s sci-fi flick, but ‘Cloud Sprawl’ is causing many a headache for IT directors across the globe. And while the term may have been first coined over two years ago, it appears it’s only now that we’re coming to understand the kind of issues it presents.
The sprawl is something that occurs as a result of business applications being used by employees of big organisations “in the cloud” and via remote access, without the consent or sign-off by company IT departments.
It may sound innocuous, but imagine the scenario – a global corporation with say, 10,000 connected employees, suddenly finds a sharp rise in unauthorised costs and relays it back to the IT department. The IT department then discovers that hundreds of new applications are being remotely connected to and used by employees without their permission, on a pay-as-you-go basis. It’s easy for the problem to spiral (or rather, sprawl) out of control. It’s the ultimate outsourcing problem.
What does the IT department do? It can’t simply put a lid on the situation. The whole point of that organisation’s connection with cloud-based software-as-a-service is to streamline IT; make it more mobile and easier to upgrade to new services in order to be able to efficiently react to market changes, and new requirements that require new software.
As an example, many businesses in the US are now connected to Salesforce’s AppExchange. Employees can dip in and out of business applications depending on what they need to get certain jobs done. It’s services like this that make the concept of cloud computing so revolutionary, but so challenging at the same time.
Cost isn’t the only issue, either. We were luckily enough to talk about the problem to an IT provider, Avanade, last month through Business Cloud News, and they made it clear how problematic cloud sprawl was becoming:
“The danger in staff accessing and using multiple unmonitored services from the cloud in the workplace is that it can lead to cloud sprawl, which in turn can leave important or confidential company and customer data vulnerable, unsecured – or lost altogether,” said Nick Merriman, the company’s Head of Cloud in the UK.
“Furthermore, cloud sprawl can prevent companies from fully leveraging many of the advantages and cost savings associated with cloud computing. Without careful management and a defined strategy in place, an organisation risks undoing many of the benefits that cloud computing offers.”
IT Directors in the UK are concerned by the spread of cloud services in the UK – 67 per cent of them, according to a recent survey conducted by another computing provider, Opsview. If fact, 54 per cent of those surveyed were unsure of how many cloud-based services their employees were even using – underlining the lack of visibility cloud computing can create.
“Ultimately unless the IT department has visibility into the cloud services being used by employees it is very difficult to keep track of what is being spent at any one time, since users are not going through traditional IT procurement channels,” said the company’s Product Manager, James Peel.
And this is evidently the biggest issue. Cloud computing isn’t a traditional procurement channel, even though many IT organisations say they’ve been doing software-as-a-service for years.
So while security continues to remain the cloud’s top topic for debate in many IT expos and among many column inches, perhaps cloud sprawl deserves more attention. It could be the difference between the cloud proving to be a genuinely cost-effective way for businesses to do IT, and a subscription-based nightmare with blockbuster-flop-sized repercussions.
Author: Chris Ward
Source
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