Cloud services can boost a business’ performance at minimal capital investment on IT infrastructure. However, the price to pay for such perks is rather expensive, I suppose.
As reported by Sooraj Shah of Computing.co.uk, according to a recent research commissioned by Opsview 67 percent of UK IT decision makers worry about how easy their staffs to sign up and install cloud services – almost at will.
Consider this most probable scenario: It seem that due to the affordability and ease of use of cloud services, employees take too much liberty of signing up with a particular cloud service, pay with their credit cards, and charge the unnecessary expenses back to their companies.
Unnecessary expenses? Yes.
Businesses need to pay for expenses on the cloud services that can, allegedly, improve their productivity. Consider this: If your business employs 10 staffs who are proactively signing up with cloud services they think the best for them and their companies, you would end up paying for 10 different cloud services. This is actually the worry of 57 percent respondents of the survey.
The risks of cloud sprawl
To further the above issue – we do know the staffs are just trying their best to work well for their companies. So, they use their newly founded “the ultimate” cloud service and start working on projects and other business tasks with the help of the cloud app.
Alas, not many loyal staffs these days; some of them will quit after a year or two, and decide to take on better jobs elsewhere. The ex-employer is now facing a headache: The projects those staffs are working on are now on different cloud services! And they left without telling their employer how to access the data – if possible. Welcome to cloud sprawl!
So – what to do with the cloud services?
Those issues are headaches to UK’s IT directors – not mentioning other issues raised from such situation: Inability to connect each cloud service (e.g. due to the different cloud apps development platforms) and manage them in such a way that they can work together as a packaged solution. What worse: The have important data get stuck in the ex-employees’ cloud services.
Unfortunately, those are inevitable. Introducing IT policies on signing up cloud services could help, but as we all know, rules are meant to be broken. In my opinion, there is no way a company can control how its staffs should do with cloud services. The same survey confirms: Over 75 percent organizations confess that employees defy IT policy regarding the use of cloud services.
Regarding the survey results, James Peel of Opsview advises for businesses to have a monitoring system allowing them to see the big picture; what cloud services are being used in the business.
One thing for sure, cloud sprawl and counter-productive cloud services sign ups are major issues businesses need to take care about. Establishing a well-defined IT policy and adopting a cloud apps usage monitoring system might help your business.
