Tension arising between biz and IT over cloud

The move to public cloud has brought tension between IT stakeholders and their business counterparts over expectations, complexity and costs, a BMC survey reveals. The study pointed out that the IT teams were under pressure to deliver on the high expectations of business department--partly because of dificulty of providing the same level of management across public and private cloud services. 

The survey released Wednesday, conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of BMC, garnered responses from 327 enterprise infrastructure executives and architects in Asia-Pacific, United States and Europe.

It noted that CIOs have become increasingly concerned that business teams were willing to circumvent IT departments. Of those polled, 72 percent had agreed or strongly agreed that their business executives saw moving to public cloud services as a way to be independent of IT. There strain on the IT department was compounded by the pull of cost reduction and simplification in one direction, and better, cheaper and faster in the other.

Furthermore, 71 percent of respondents also thought that IT operations must be responsible to ensure public cloud services meet their firm's requirements for performance, security and availability, and 61 percent agreed that it will be difficult to provide the same level of management across public and private cloud services.

It was also found that thebusiness departments of enterpriseswere willing to go around IT to get public cloud services. About 58 percent of respondents were running mission-critical workloads in the unmanaged public cloud regardless of policy, while only 36 percent had policies allowing this.

Comprehensive cloud strategy needed, to include public cloud
Cost reduction was found to be the top IT priority over the next 12 months, with complexity reduction being the top strategy for achieving savings. High on the agenda for 81 percent of the respondents was also having a comprehensive cloud strategy.

The survey indicated that public clouds acquired by personnel outside of IT departments were the top driver of complexity and risk. This suggested that a comprehensive cloud strategy had to include public cloud services.

When respondents were asked what type of cloud they were interested in, the majority--or 37 percent--chose a hybrid cloud running on a combination of internal and external infrastructure. Along with the ubiquity of public cloud and the high degree of internal complexity firms faced, the findings highlighted the need to take a unified systems management approach.

"This survey has helped us to pinpoint the pains felt by both the business and IT as they struggle to adapt IT strategies to the avalanche of public cloud consumption," Mark Settle, CIO of BMC said in a statement. "The conclusion is that the need for a comprehensive, unified environment is becoming a top priority for business to connect everything--from the mainframe to the cloud."