We are in an age where cloud is no longer a nice-to-have but a must-have to compete in today’s application economy. While traditional IT management platforms are still relevant, cloud provides the efficiency and agility that today’s new and innovative business models demand.

As organizations continue to move workloads and applications off premise, IT operations teams should think about how they will need to overcome the following four key forces in order to speed the adoption of cloud infrastructures:

Notion of cloud being a “black box”:  Recently at a tradeshow I overheard a couple of IT operations executives talking about how cloud is a “black box”. They are afraid if they place a certain resource on the cloud, they won’t have much visibility or control over performance, utilization and costs. This is a misconception, as a lot of cloud providers establish very comprehensive performance metrics into cloud systems and services. The key is gathering the right metrics and presenting them in an actionable format so that your IT teams can optimize performance, utilization and costs.

Enforcement of a “single” cloud platform: In an ideal situation you might want a single silver bullet or cloud platform for all your needs but the reality is quite different. All popular cloud providers have their own pros and cons. One provider might not be a good fit for all your application or use cases. Forcing your business and application teams to adopt a single platform might not be right for your business. In fact, in certain cases taking a hybrid cloud approach can bring more benefit and can even provide a competitive advantage. IT operations teams need to be able to support multiple cloud-based infrastructures and technologies so teams can chose the right platform for their specific use cases.

Complexity of multiple, disjointed management tools: As organizations adopt cloud-based platforms or resources, they tend to also accumulate multiple monitoring or management tools. This creates an additional layer of management complexity and provides piecemeal visibility into cross-platform IT services. As a result, team get stuck in learning, integrating and managing multiple monitoring tools versus optimizing end-to-end IT services. Your cloud monitoring and management approach needs to be built upon a unified, open architecture that allows you to support new technologies rapidly and provide end-to-end visibility into your customers’ experience.

Lack of “in-house” cloud expertise:  In a recent survey 56% of respondents saw developing cloud expertise as a major hurdle to success for their operations. To help alleviate this issue, organizations need to proactively put in place education plans that encourage existing IT staff to learn new cloud and dynamic infrastructure-based technologies. There are numerous training firms and even online training sites such as Cloud Academy that can get teams up and running on basic clouds skills in just a few days.

In order to fully evaluate or realize the benefits of cloud for your business, your team needs to understand it first and foremost.

Which of these forces are you having to deal with? What else is a challenge?

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