Cloud Consumption

Last week, Gartner published their Top 10 cloud security predictions for 2016. They predict that “by 2020, one third of successful attacks experienced by enterprises will be on their shadow IT resources.” As Gartner rightly points out, the reality is your business is engaging with shadow IT resource…

If you read the avalanche of marketing material from venture-funded loss-making startups in the cloud space you’d think that on-premise infrastructure will become akin to old typewriters lying around in store rooms and that IT departments will go the way of the dinosaurs after the asteroid hit. Any…

Last week I attended the 2015 London Gartner Data Center conference. In my first blog (part 1) on this event,  I covered some of my main learnings and observations, #1 .. #5: Bi-modal IT, Anti-fragility, Shadow IT (and how Cisco Cloud Consumption Services can help you here, SDN, and Software asset…

Did you know it pays to optimize your cloud strategy? (Literally) A recent IDC/Cisco report shows that key business indicators (top-line revenues, strategic IT budget allocations, greater IT asset flexibility) all increased with a better cloud strategy. You see this in the results. On average, compa…

How crazy is this? We’ve found that large organizations on average use 172 compute, 157 marketing and sales and 62 finance services from the cloud. Some organizations use nearly double these amounts! Simply put, as businesses groups control more IT spend and purchase more cloud services, cloud spraw…

Cloud sprawl is a BIG challenge. Large companies use 730 individual cloud services – a number which has grown a staggering 21% in just six months. If you don’t know by now what your organization is using, you need to! At Cisco Live US 2015, Haley Gallant of the Cisco Cloud Consumption practice did a…

Co-authored with    Robert Dimicco Senior Director, Advanced Services   How many cloud services do you think your enterprise uses? You’ll be surprised: businesses use ~10-15 X more cloud services – unknowingly. This is what we call ‘cloud sprawl,’ because there are too many cloud service…

In the last two years, we’ve used Cisco Cloud Consumption Assessment and helped many customers discover and understand their cloud services, costs and security risks. The results are surprising! On average, enterprises use nearly 675 cloud services, have much more risk controls needing attention, an…

By the end of this year, Gartner predicts 1 of 4 cloud service providers (CSPs) will no longer be in business due to consolidation or lack of funding. Based on the explosive growth of cloud use, you are likely using SaaS to support business critical functions and IaaS compute or storage services fro…