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By: Autumn Salama, Vice President of Cloud Operations, DataBank
The sales manager calls the IT Help Desk: “Can you fix a problem with Salesforce?”
“We don’t use Salesforce,” the IT tech says….suspiciously.
“Sorry, I didn’t tell you,” the manager confesses. “We just signed up last week.”
Scenarios like this commonly occur across businesses of all sizes. End-users or business units decide they need a new application or a server. They tap into a cloud service with a credit card. Just like that, company data floats across the Internet.
As end-users independently adopt cloud services, these occurrences lead to the uncontrolled growth of cloud sprawl. With no central oversight, an inefficient IT environment emerges—with security risks and increased costs.
End-users don’t plan for these consequences. They simply want to address a need to help them do their jobs.
While cloud sprawl creates IT headaches, it’s driven by the benefits of a hybrid IT environment. No service provides a one-size-fits-all platform, infrastructure, or application. Each workload requires a different environment. These range from colocation data centers to public clouds, private clouds, and software-as-as-service (SaaS) offerings. That’s why many enterprises adopt a hybrid approach, comprising multiple environments and on-premises data centers.
Hybrid environments also make perfect sense for technology leaders. If you try to make all your workloads fit inside one cloud, some will suffer in performance. They may also operate inefficiently or fail to take advantage of all the features of a cloud offering. Some tools work only in specific cloud environments.
Unfortunately, the appeal of hybrid environments encourages cloud sprawl. Business users want to maximize the potential performance of their use-case workloads. However, sprawl can quickly lead to IT teams losing control as marketing, sales, human resources, and other teams all buy tools that suit their needs—also known as shadow IT.
When IT does not centralize control to manage all the cloud services in play, bad things happen:
Perhaps, the marketing team and the sales team use separate instances of the same CRM tool—rather than sharing the application. Together, they pay for 100 licenses but use only 50. The software development team uses a developer platform to build and test code but forget to shut it down after deploying the new application.
End-users also often need help to fix technical issues in the clouds they set up. IT teams may suffer from bandwidth fatigue. They may need to integrate cloud services or make changes to an application, and if the request requires a unique technical skillset, the company has to hire expensive consultant resources.
To take on the challenge of cloud sprawl, begin with a comprehensive policy and processes to review cloud service vendors. When someone asks for a new tool, IT can check if the company already has one providing the same service.
For example, many companies use multiple collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Slack. Perhaps, one can deliver the required services.
In addition to vetting cloud service providers at the onboarding stage, review them regularly. Providers expand their offerings, so you may discover redundant services down the road. Instead of moving data between redundant tools, you can keep the data in one place.
Another tactic to consider: Consolidate cloud environments to gain greater control over security. Each cloud provider deploys a wide range of security postures. Every time you move data in and out creates another risk of a security breach.
Plus, many data breaches occur through third-party cloud partners. According to Gartner, third-party risk is one of the driving forces behind the top cybersecurity trends. The more clouds, the more places you store data, the greater the potential risk.
This makes a solid security review process for vendors mandatory. You need to know which data sets you store and where, and you don’t want to silo any data.
No IT team wants to hamstring internal teams from doing their jobs. However, if you give these teams full autonomy to acquire tools and store data in the cloud, you introduce risk. The key is to balance that autonomy with the appropriate centralized controls.
Another strategy to contain cloud sprawl is to collaborate with a managed service provider. DataBank provides managed services for IT infrastructures with a hybrid services approach that allows enterprises to use our colocation data centers, bare metal servers, self-managed and Databank managed private clouds while also facilitating interconnection to other cloud providers.
Through cloud repatriation, you can consolidate multiple clouds into one physical location or across regional data centers with a single provider. This allows you to optimize workloads and avoid unintended costs, such as fees for transferring data.
Repatriation helps contain sprawl through consolidation that makes sense. Complimenting consolidation by leveraging hybrid cloud management tools that manage licenses and track the usage as well as the spend of SaaS applications and public cloud platforms can also aide in optimizing your hybrid cloud environment.
The challenge of managing cloud sprawl and the security risks will continue to expand as business users run their data through AI models. Cloud sprawl often occurs because the available internal tools don’t meet the needs of the business.
IT can counter this trend by staying ahead of their organizations. If you proactively offer tools (such as AI) and augment existing tools, end-users, likely, will give them a try. They won’t look for tools on their own.
By addressing their needs ahead of time, you also gain the ability to centralize and control all IT services—and avoid unnecessary cloud sprawl.
Learn more about tapping into managed services from your colocation provider to save money and start controlling your cloud sprawl by contacting DataBank today.
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