Business leaders struggle with decision to keep or ditch early cloud investments

Business leaders are struggling with the decision to keep or ditch early cloud investments, new research has found.

Enterprise cloud management provider CloudBolt Software has released its latest CloudBolt Industry Insights report, The Truth About First-Generation Cloud Management Platforms.

During the summer of 2021, CloudBolt commissioned a global survey to explore the sentiments of customers who were at a crossroads with their original CMP provider.

The clearest example of this is the VMware vRealize Automation customer base, who are looking at a complicated migration from vRA7x to vRA8x. The research, conducted on the Pulse platform (a Gartner-owned research subsidiary) is based on over 200 responses from directors, VPs, and CXOs currently using vRA.

Leveraging the vRA base as the proxy, the report shows the struggles and tough choices companies are making in keeping up with the new cloud order.

"The hybrid cloud market is moving so fast that first-generation providers are having difficulty adapting to emerging requirements," says Jeff Kukowski, CloudBolt chief executive officer.

"Customers want to employ an expanding set of tools to better leverage approaches likeCI/CD andIaC. First-generation solutions were not designed with this in mind, so the pivot can be painful and expensive, with integration challenges sitting front and centre," he says.

Key Findings:

The tangled webs we weave
First-generation CMP solutions have become tightly-woven masses of custom coded integrations to other clouds, tools, and infrastructure.Layers of custom code are written on top of one another to bend the integrations to company requirements, especially as those requirements evolve over time. In the case of vRA, fully 6 out of 10 companies report custom coding at least half their integrations.

Delaying the pain 
When faced with these custom coding challenges, most companies simply hesitate, waiting until the last possible minute to make a decision (i.e. stay with the original platform, rip and replace, or augment functionality with other solutions). For vRA7 customers, 98% still have not migrated roughly 2 years after the vRA8 October 2019 release.

Better integrations = better automation 
For those on the path to vRA 8, better, deeper integrations are critical. Integrations enable automation, so the better the integrations, the more automation potential.Survey respondents specifically said they need better ability to integrate multiple solutions and tools with vRA(68%) and deeper-level integrations for vRA(62%).

Multi everything
What's surprising is that enterprises aren't just looking at their incumbent stacks; many are leaning into multiple solutions to get the job done. In the case of vRA customers, 59% are re-evaluating and potentially considering options that include augmenting vRA with other tools like Terraform, Ansible, or even another CMP to get the functionality they need. Enterprises today need a multi-tool approach to a multi-cloud world.