Is the hybrid cloud's biggest challenge a lack of expertise
One would think that three industry giants competing against each other in a veritable death match might be nothing but good for customers, and in many ways it is — prices are coming down, functionality is on the rise, and there is a lot of integration with other third party software vendors to enable key scenarios. But this type of landscape really comes with its own challenges for patrons of the public cloud: how to stay on top of a constantly changing technology stack with the same limited resources they already have.
RightScale, a cloud portfolio management company, recently released a report entitled “RightScale 2016 State of the Cloud Report,” and inside it reveals that, according to respondents to its annual survey, 32 percent of cloud users find lack of resources and expertise is their chief challenge when embracing and consuming cloud services. Somewhat incredibly, this lack of experience and education about cloud services and specifically how to use them trumps security concerns, even among enterprise IT teams and security pros, two groups whom you would think would have security at the forefront of their mind.
To me, it is telling that the cloud has become so complex and evolved so quickly that even professional IT workers and CIOs cannot always get their heads around what is possible. What are some factors that go into this phenomenon Three come to mind immediately:
The cloud wars have basically resulted in a battlefield with three industry giants duking it out: VMware, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure. The RightScale survey indicates that AWS leads in adoption, with 57 percent of respondents as customers. Microsoft Azure has a combined adoption rate among the RightScale survey takers of 30 percent between IaaS and PaaS solutions, and 44 percent of respondents say they use the VMware vSphere private cloud product.
Each of them has strengths and weakness; obviously a VMware cloud is attractive for shops who have standardized on the VMware hypervisor, whereas organizations that predominantly use Windows Server naturally gravitate, at least from a usability perspective, to Microsoft Azure. Of course Amazon Web Services is the grandfather of them all and offers a vast array of platform as a service, infrastructure as a service, and other types of offerings. How does one map a service from one provider to another in order to compare apples to apples How does one reconcile the types of virtual machines available in Microsoft Azure against the same machines in Amazon Web Services This is a real challenge.
[Related: IT is getting cloud storage security all wrong]
If your cloud efforts simply involve signing up for public cloud services like hosting, storage, and mobile notifications, then that is one issue. But what if you are trying to tie together complex on premises systems with their cloud brethren What if your end goal is to configure failover and redundancies so that you can burst up to the cloud when circumstances and demand warrants, and then bring your workloads back down when those same circumstances change What if you have complex data residency requirements and other regulatory impediments How does each of the big three cloud providers handle these type of hybrid cloud specific scenarios
It seems like every week or two I get an e-mail from Microsoft with an Azure pricing and services update. Amazon and others operate at a similar speed, which is far, far faster than enterprises are generally used to dealing with (cough, see Windows XP migrations, cough, cough). With the products, offerings, and pricing changing several times a year, how do you keep up How do you remember which management portals do what How do you know which Azure portal (the new, the semi old, or the classic portal) to use to launch new services
“Right now, educational resources are very scarce, and seldom standardized,” says John Obeto II, CEO at Logikworx, a managed services provider based in Marina del Rey, Calif. “Prospective businesses do not know what to expect when they hire that cloud maestro, and with there not being any standardization is qualifications or certifications, you could hire a nitwit who would end up costing you not just money, but time – time to deployment and implementation, time to market – and heaven forbid, kill your brand.”
[Related: Cloud adoption soars, but integration challenges remain]
This lack of expertise and resources is risky, especially as cloud adoption increases. Some of the downfalls include:
What can we take away from this Ultimately, cloud providers need to further invest in training and education resources that customer organizations can know and trust. “Any cloud implemented MUST have an educational track for training and certification,” says Obeto, “that is verifiable using metrics that even the average IT administrator would understand.” Until then, customers are left with a shiny sales pitch, lots of buzzwords and promised opportunities, and a lot of complexity—without a corresponding amount of resources to figure out how to get from point A to point B. That is expensive and risky. Be aware.