Firms struggling to fully exploit cloud due to lack of strategy and governance

A group of CIOs at a recent Computing event discussed how cloud use has grown at most firms without an overarching strategy, making it hard to find the promised speed and agility benefits

Many organisations are struggling to fully exploit their use of cloud services due to a lack of strategy and governance.

That was one of the themes to come out of a recent Computing dining club, attended by 15 CIOs from diverse industries.

The event was under Chatham House rules, so most attendees cannot be directly quoted.

One CIO in the consumer goods industry explained that architecture doesn't get any simpler just because it's partly in the cloud.

"Cloud mirrors the complexity of your business. The board asked me one day why our cloud costs are so high. I said, just look at what we're trying to do! Our business is so complex that it has to be reflected back in what we're doing in the cloud."

Greg Hanson, CTO at Informatica, said that the problem lies in the fact that cloud adoption has been largely ungoverned at most organisations.

"Roughly a third of IT budgets are spent on cloud right now, and about 45 per cent of that spend is wasted. One issue is that cloud adoption has been largely ungoverned.

"There was an initial rush to adopt due to the perceived line of business advantage, but then you end up with multiple instances of Salesforce, or lots of pieces of different platforms at different vendors at the same firm."

Another CIO in the telecommunications industry agreed.

"The business takes a decision to use Salesforce for instance, but they're not all choosing a cloud, they're just choosing a business solution. The problem comes back to IT because they need us to support it."

Hanson added that this results in a large number of additional skills needed by the business.

"Then you get a proliferation of required skillsets. People talk about not being able to hire the right sorts of people to manage everything across their diverse landscape of services, and this is why."

He explained that many organisations initially expected the cloud to bring about cost savings, only later understanding that the real benefit was likely to be increased agility. However, with this ungoverned approach, neither benefit will be seen.

"One of the biggest reasons to move to the cloud originally was economic. But now the consensus is that it's not an economy driver, it brings agility. Ironically if your cloud adoption is not governed well, you hamper this agility, and the business can't move any faster."

A CIO in the financial services sector emphasised that a considered strategy is essential.

"The business case to just jump feet first into cloud isn't there. You need to be selective about what services you put into cloud, and what makes most sense to migrate, and what you should keen in-house."

Hanson added that the goal should be to keep things simple.

"There's never been a more timely reason to build a more comprehensive data strategy to simplify that diverse world. That also helps to reduce the required skillset, and helps you to focus on strategic choices.

"If you don't rationalise your suppliers and skillsets you'll see more complexity. And it's harder for more complex organisations to make innovative changes, because they have a fragmented landscape of data and skillsets."