We recently released a sponsored report from Enterprise Strategy Group that looked at multi-cloud complexity, its costs, and how bringing consistency to all these environments can create value for an organization. You can read the report here.

There are many points to take from this research; it’s well worth your time to go through the full report. If you are in the process of formulating your cloud strategy the insights here can be helpful to you. More than anything else, though, this research puts in stark terms something we have seen consistently in the market. It highlights the massive gulf between potential benefits and the existing reality of cloud deployments.

Consider the numbers. Fully 80% of respondents – senior technology decision-makers at midsize and large companies – say their hybrid cloud initiatives have been effective at driving value for the organization. In this report hybrid cloud was defined as having consistent management across multiple public and private clouds. Yet only 5% say they have achieved their goals of having a consistent hybrid cloud. What do we make of this gap?

It shows that while there is much work to be done organizations believe in its value and should work quickly to realize it. Leaders believe in the technology and strategy but are struggling to piece it all together in a coherent, effective way.

Maybe this gap is indicative of how people have approached their cloud strategy so far. Often, they didn’t start with a coherent, thoughtful, centralized strategy. Almost every company adopted the multi-cloud in a more decentralized, organic way. Now, they are having to work to create some cohesiveness of approach across the entire organization.

A rising split between ad hoc multi-cloud and consistent hybrid cloud

The data shows other interesting trends. While you might have guessed that consistency would be a way to simplify IT management the benefits went well beyond fewer hours worked. Among the most interesting points to come from the report:

• Consistent management seen as an obvious cost cutter. Surveyed orgs say they expect consistent IT management tools for private and public cloud to cut costs 19% on average.
• Data is safer with consistent data protection. When asked about the prospect of using consistent infrastructure management tools across private and public cloud locations, [respondents said] they would expect to reduce the number of security breaches, application outages, or other events affecting its public cloud-resident data by 30%, on average.
• Developers benefit too. 96% of surveyed orgs say they expect consistent IT management for private and public cloud to make it easier for developers to push code to production
• Perhaps an unlikely source of innovation. 74% of surveyed orgs said they expect consistent IT management for private and public cloud to increase innovation pace

This shows that while IT benefits greatly from centralizing the cloud strategy and deploying tools that span all the cloud environments, it might be the business and the end users who see the most benefit from this strategy.

Closing the gap between multi-cloud reality and potential

The report shows the distance that many companies still must travel to achieve their goals in the multi-cloud. It also shows clearly that those companies that have made strong investments in the right on-premise infrastructure – modern, performant, and that are consistent – have strengthened their position and their business results.

The good news: it is not too late to bring order and centralized strategy to your cloud deployments, or to strengthen your data center. This data shows that the value is available to you today, not in the distant future.

ESG Research Insights Paper “The Cloud Complexity Imperative: Why Organizations Must Unify and Simplify the Management of their Sprawling Multicloud Environment” commissioned by Dell Technologies, VMWare and Intel Corporation, February 2020. Results are based on a survey of 1,257 IT decision makers from 11 countries and benchmarking consistent operations management across both public cloud and modern on-premises private cloud infrastructure. Actual results will vary. Full report: