Report: Complexity of cloud management is biggest headache

91 per cent of enterprises want a hybrid cloud, but 71 per cent worry about management

Almost all enterprises are looking to establish a hybrid cloud environment, but worries about the complexity of managing such environments remain pronounced.

This is the main finding of research commissioned by ICT services provider 2E2.

Some 91 per cent of respondents felt a hybrid cloud model to be the most suitable for their business. However, 71 per cent of these are not sure if their management capabilities will be able to support it.

The report suggests that this fear stems from the interdependent nature of in-house IT infrastructures, where 68 per cent of enterprises felt that because of this, migrating to the cloud was a risk.

"IT services or applications are interlinked, which leaves businesses worried that if they put one service in the cloud it will impact others around it," said Nathan Marke, CTO at 2E2.

"The IT infrastructure within many organisations currently resembles spaghetti junction," he added.

Marke suggests that businesses need to audit their infrastructure and get a clear view of the interdependencies of different IT services.

"The middleware environments are by far the most complex, you have to really work out what interdependencies are before you deploy them to the cloud," he said.

Organisations can then make decisions about how to best rationalise IT and establish whether deployment to the cloud is a possibility.

"It is understandable that organisations are worried about control. However, by auditing their infrastructure and services, and understanding how critical they are to the business, they can put themselves in the driving seat".