IT departments are being sidestepped by business leaders who adopt their own cloud-based technologies to innovate faster and meet growth objectives, according to the “VMware State of the Cloud 2016” research report.
At the same time, IT departments are left to shoulder responsibility for things that go wrong. This raises a pressing need for IT to adopt a common operating environment for all clouds to mitigate complexities, inefficiencies and security risks, and more importantly, simultaneously enable innovation.
The report found that enterprises in Singapore face high levels of IT decentralization, with more than 61 percent of respondents agreeing that the purchasing and management of IT are taking place outside of IT’s purview. Survey respondents from Singapore also indicated that their companies suffer from a lack of transparency over IT spending – the highest in the Asia Pacific region (69 percent), and lack of awareness of overall IT spending across the business – the second highest in the region (71 percent).
Line of business leaders feel that IT is not moving fast enough to support the business and its drive for innovation. This has given rise to decentralization and multi-cloud adoption, with line of business leaders in local firms purchasing an average of five additional cloud services without consulting their IT departments.
While many respondents agreed this decentralized approach increases business responsiveness to market changes (64 percent), allows them to bring new products and services to market more quickly (57 percent), increases employee satisfaction (57 percent) and even helps to attract better talent (52 percent), the respondents also agreed that the decentralized approach has led to a duplication of spending on IT services (56 percent), applications being developed outside of corporate or government regulations (57 percent) and lack of regulatory compliance around data protection (63 percent).
More than two-third of local respondents agreed that decentralization increases their firms’ vulnerabilities to hacking and cyber-attacks (69 percent), given that 64 percent indicated that lines of business are purchasing non-secure solutions. The research also pointed to the region’s widening skill gap, with almost 7 in 10 respondents highlighting that decentralization has caused IT’s job to become more challenging, by introducing a shift in expectations on how they should be supporting the business. Seven in 10 respondents now believe the IT department should be responsible for enabling other lines of business to drive innovation, but must set the strategic direction and be accountable for security.
"This echoes what we've been hearing from our customers across the region – every single organization has a hybrid cloud environment, with workloads and applications across different platforms. The challenge for CIOs is to continue enabling their companies to innovate and meet growth objectives, yet effectively manage and secure applications dispersed across multiple cloud environments. VMware’s Cross-Cloud Architecture responds directly to this challenge by offering cloud freedom and control,” said Duncan Hewett, senior vice president and general manager, Asia-Pacific & Japan, VMware.
To help organizations reconcile the priorities and objectives of both business leaders and IT decision makers in today’s multi-cloud landscape, VMware has extended the company's hybrid cloud strategy with the VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture, enabling customers to run, manage, connect, and secure their applications across clouds and devices in a common operating environment. A new set of Cross-Cloud Services which VMware is developing, will enable enterprises to manage, govern and secure applications running across public clouds, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure and IBM Cloud.
In addition, VMware Cloud Foundationoffers a new "as-a-service" option that delivers the full power of the software-defined data center (SDDC) in a hybrid cloud environment.