Nearly 80 per cent of businesses in Singapore rely on two or more cloud service providers, but they’re not getting the cloud metadata they need to satisfy auditors and track the performance of cloud services.
The result: businesses here had suffered negative business impact, including outages, wasted resources, unexpected costs and challenges reporting to management.
Those were the findings of a Forrester survey commissioned by iland, a cloud service provider, to evaluate the level of transparency that businesses got out of their infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) vendor. The survey polled 275 IT managers and decision makers in the United States, Britain and Singapore, with the majority working in mid-sized and large enterprises.
Why aren’t cloud service providers providing such metadata — data about performance, configuration and operations of cloud workloads — to businesses?
While this data is available to cloud providers, it takes effort to pull it out and present it a way that makes sense to businesses, says Lilac Schoenbeck, iland’s vice president for product marketing and management.
Perhaps the larger issue here is that cloud service providers seem to be out of touch with the needs of their customers, who increasingly need such metadata to meet compliance requirements.
The numbers are telling. While 72 per cent of respondents had compliance requirements, most said the lack of cloud metadata led to difficulties in implementing compliance controls (55 per cent), understanding the provider’s compliance (51 per cent) and getting documentation on the provider (51 per cent).
Besides compliance issues, 43 per cent of respondents also faced performance problems or outages, and 36 per cent met with unexpected bills — all due to the lack of transparency.
One data point could well spur cloud providers to get their act together: 68 per cent of Singapore respondents said they cannot grow their cloud footprint due to transparency, compliance and support issues they faced with their service providers.
Forrester offered some advice to companies that want the most successful cloud experience:
Demand honesty and clarity about compliance data, processes, and expertise: Your cloud provider can’t keep any secrets. Look for a partner that offers proactive compliance, alerting you when something needs attention, and has comprehensive reporting and audit support to quickly resolve any issues. Make sure you can speak directly with the provider’s compliance team.
Get the performance, security, and cost data you need, when you need it: As with any critical business relationship, you must verify the claims of your cloud provider. Your senior management will expect you to keep them informed as well. Are you getting the performance promised? How much are you spending? Are you being overcharged? Look for a cloud provider that’s not afraid to share all the performance, security, and cost data you need to answer these questions.
Look for a cloud provider staffed by experts who know who you are and who pick up the phone: Are you just another account number to your cloud provider? Our research shows that providers that invest in the human element of cloud — such as helping with design and onboarding; offering access to experts; and having trained, caring human beings on the other end of the support line — will have a better relationship with their customers overall. And those customers, in turn, are much more likely to expand their use of cloud services in the future.
