According to a recent survey from technology intelligence platform Snow Software, 68% of IT leaders have a hybrid cloud strategy, implying that it comprises public and private clouds. Yet the management of cloud and infrastructure are not devoid of bottlenecks. The data states that the positive impacts of the cloud (as perceived by the survey participants) are that it is faster, more secure, and more affordable when compared to the private and on-premises infrastructure. However, the cloud also appears to be perceived as a puzzle without a one-size-fits-all solution.

Thirty-three percent of IT leaders agreed that surging cybersecurity threats are their companies’ greatest infrastructure management challenges, followed by a lack of integration between new and old infrastructure technologies (26%), meeting governance and compliance requirements (25%), and managing company spending (24%). Along the same lines, when it came to cloud management challenges that the IT leaders would like to solve, mitigating cybersecurity protection concerns ranked at the top, with 24% of votes, followed by the inadequacy of skilled IT staff (18%) and the lack of cloud standardization (14%).

Snow Software’s survey was collated from 500 IT leaders associated with organizations that have more than 500 employees in the U. S. and the U.K. and aimed to gauge where cloud infrastructure stands as of today. Apart from the above, the survey pointed out a host of other cloud-related intelligence as well.

Increased cloud use and spending

More than 70% of the IT leaders have increased their overall cloud spending in the last year. The surge in spending was largely motivated by the performance incentive companies drew from cloud services during the pandemic. Almost half (46%) of leaders found it critical to their operations during the outbreak of COVID-19. Apart from spending, 70% of IT leaders increased the use of public cloud platforms as well. Such platforms include AWS, Microsoft Azure, etc. One-third (33%) of the IT leaders increased their organizations’ cloud resources anywhere between an additional 26-50%.

Twenty-two percent of companies reported that they rely on cloud computing for scalability and flexibility. In addition, 17% consider cloud computing to be the best environment to develop, test, and launch products and services; and 11% of the survey respondents said their reliance on cloud computing was for its built-in and tested cybersecurity protection features. Alternatively, 12% reported using cloud computing only for backup and data storage.

Who are the experts?

Sixty-three percent of C-level IT executives rated themselves as experts, while only 20% of IT managers and 32% of IT directors rated themselves as experts. The survey also indicated that moving towards hybrid and multi-cloud architectures would require greater understanding, skill, and education.