Midmarket Businesses Reveal Cloud Management, DevOps Struggles -

The good news: Businesses seemingly activate new cloud applications each day. The bad news: IT executives in midmarket and large organizations say they're struggling with ongoing cloud management, and many businesses still lack basic DevOps best practices, new survey results reveal.

Among the latest data points:

42% of IT executives said their internal teams don’t have the expertise and/or resources to migrate applications to the cloud; and

39% said they don’t have the ability to optimize cloud deployments for cost and performance; and

34% said they’d be unable to manage cloud technologies on an ongoing basis.

Meanwhile, 33% of IT executives said their most skilled staff is working “just to keep the lights on.”

Those data points emerged from a survey of 200 IT executives in midsize and large U.S. companies, organized by NetEnrich. Participating companies had annual revenues of between $400 million and $10 billion.

To the Cloud (or Bust)

Despite the talent and IT skills challenges, midsize and large businesses are pressing ahead with cloud-oriented projects -- though some of the data points are open to interpretation.

Roughly 97% of respondents said they’re moving applications and workloads into a public, private or hybrid cloud environment. ChannelE2E's reaction: The figure isn't surprising -- where else, after all, can a business put a workload these days besides public, private or hybrid?

Fully 68% said that DevOps has been integrated well into their traditional IT and tech operations teams. ChannelE2E's Reaction: It sounds like survey participants were a bit too generous when describing their own DevOps progress, especially since DevOps is so new to so many companies. Moreover: In the same survey findings, 58 percent of IT departments said they don't yet have a DevOps team.

Maintenance vs Innovation

The overall survey results drove home a familiar theme: Corporate IT departments still spend far too much time trying to "keep the lights on" and not enough time focused on innovation.

That's sort of ironic. The shift to cloud computing and automated IT systems was supposed to free corporate IT departments up. Instead, many companies apparently are struggling to manage their workloads -- regardless of where they run.

Not by coincidence, NetEnrich offers a range of outsourced IT and NOC (network operations center) services to help corporate IT departments offload their basic IT maintenance work.