93% of Business Units Use Cloud Services: Can You Support Them?
Nearly 95 percent of enterprise business units use cloud services -- often without the support or endorsement of central IT services. It's time for channel partners to step in and assist with vendor management, SLAs and billing guidance. Here's why.
Do you think your customers are ignoring cloud computing? Guess again. Roughly 93 percent of enterprise business units use cloud services — often without the help of central IT management or CIO (chief information officer guidance), according to survey results from 2nd Watch. For channel partners, the survey points out several clear opportunities in the hybrid cloud market.
Among the survey highlights:
- 93% of enterprise business units, from sales to operations to marketing and more, are turning to the cloud for services needed to conduct business.
- 61% of business units are bypassing their IT departments completely, and choosing, funding, and managing them on their own.
- 43% of IT departments say they plan to develop a cloud services brokerage model to keep up with demand.
The opportunities — and challenges — for channel partners are clear, according to The VAR Guy. They include:
- Helping corporate IT departments to regain control of cloud services without slowing down departmental rollouts.
- Taking inventory of existing cloud services in place, and providing vendor management services that including billing, SLA enforcement and more.
- Helping to consolidate workloads onto fewer, more strategic cloud services platforms.
- Establishing best practices for on-premises application deployments to ensure workloads can easily shift to the cloud when needed. This includes developing a software-defined data center (SDDC) strategy.
2nd Watch is expected to share deeper details about the survey results on Jan. 16. The VAR Guy will be standing by for those details.