IaaS experiments lead to cloud confusion as companies search for their perfect vendor
If your company is struggling to find the right cloud solution for your business, you are not alone — it appears an awful lot of companies are in exactly the same position.
That was one of the principle conclusions from some new research by the cloud computing company iland, in conjunction with VMware, which found that the average company is using not one but at least three Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) companies for their cloud development.
According to the research, there are a number of reasons why organisations are casting around trying to find a cloud solution — including:
- An ongoing effort to find the 'right' solution.
- A fragmentation of requirements at the departmental level.
- An unwillingness by IT to standardise on one vendor.
- A requirement for diverse suppliers because, amongst other reasons, of liability issues.
- A general urge by cloud providers to continually try new ideas that might meet their needs.
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According to the survey, there are many reasons why this is so.
"What we were seeing in the research were continuing efforts to try and find the right IaaS vendors," said Johnny Carpenter, a UK director of iland. "There is a lot of departmental-level fragmentation."
Carpenter said that the survey painted a very confused picture of cloud computing in general.
"We found that people were not talking to each other [about cloud solutions] let alone going to IT," he said. "Many are left to go it alone and make their own decisions, leading to further fragmentation. That in turn is leading to multiple vendors across multiple organisations."
The problem for IT, the research showed, is that it is all too frequently being bypassed or ignored as users experiment themselves or get together with other departments to find solutions that don't involve IT.
But is this true of IaaS in general or just the cloud? "It is true of IaaS but we also see it in cloud," Carpenter said. "We have seen a situation where there is the exact same application with one version being controlled in the US and another in the UK. They just don't talk to each other and we think this happens a lot."