BMC announced the survey of more than 1,000 IT decision-makers in 11 countries today at its BMC Exchange London event. Conducted by research firm opinion.life, the survey examines how businesses are investing in multiple public cloud solutions from several vendors to optimize costs, stay agile, and mitigate risks. These distributed, multi-cloud environments are also creating a broader attack surface and potentially increasing costs. According to the survey, 40 percent of IT leaders do not know how much their businesses are spending on cloud services in total.

“The number one driver for adopting multiple clouds is cost optimization, yet two out of every five IT leaders are completely in the dark on what their organizations are spending on cloud,” said Bill Berutti, President, Enterprise Solutions at BMC. “Multi-cloud has truly changed the game: the traditional way of looking at IT infrastructure simply does not work anymore. IT leaders must consider new ways to manage multi-cloud environments to ensure they are getting the expected benefits from public cloud in terms of cost savings, automated performance optimization, and increased security and governance.”

Recognizing the complexity of managing multiple cloud environments, 80 percent of respondents agree that new approaches and tools are required. Among the new approaches being considered is AI, with 78 percent of IT decision-makers indicating that their companies are looking for ways to apply artificial intelligence as part of their multi-cloud management strategies.

BMC offers the following recommendations for organizations to successfully manage multi-cloud environments:

• Gain increased visibility into cloud assets to get the complete picture
• Get a clear picture of cloud costs: it may not make sense to run everything in cloud
• Take a proactive stance to harden a broader attack surface, ensure compliance
• Re-think management approaches: simplify and automate as much as possible
• AI and machine learning can remove repetition out of multi-cloud management

45 percent of the global survey respondents indicated cost optimization as a reason for using more than one public cloud vendor, with 44 percent indicating a desire to maintain agility and 40 percent mitigating risk with multiple cloud providers. Survey respondents indicated that implementing security and governance policies is the top challenge when managing multi-cloud environments, followed by automation, optimizing resource utilization, and cloud consumption costs. Highlighting the need to address the security challenges amplified by a larger, more distributed, increasingly virtual infrastructure, IT decision-makers indicate that security is the primary area they intend to invest in over the next 24-36 months.

“The majority of IT leaders now understand that the complexity created by multi-cloud is amplifying the traditional challenges business face: security, visibility, cost, performance, automation, and migration,” Berutti continued. “Now they must also adapt their management approach using new technology solutions built for multi-cloud that leverage machine learning and AI to reduce that complexity.”

For more information, download BMC’s full report: “Multi-Cloud Requires New Management Strategies and a Forward-Looking Approach.”

Methodology
1,026 respondents were surveyed online worldwide (France, Germany, Spain, UK, Australia, China, India, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, USA) in August 2017. Respondents were eligible if they had specific IT job titles (Senior ITDMs: CIO, CTO, COO, CDO, VP IT Infrastructure and Operations, VP Application Development or above; or ITDM: Enterprise Architect, Cloud Architect, IT/MIS/BIS Director, IT/MIS/BIS Manager), were employed by a business of more than 250 employees, and were currently using cloud services. The USA and India respondents were split between 50 senior ITDMs and 100 other ITDMs. All other markets were split between 30 senior ITDMs and 50 other ITDMs. Data has been weighted so that each market contributes equally to regional and global totals. Respondents were surveyed online by research firm opinion.life.

About BMC 
BMC is a global leader in innovative software solutions that enable businesses to transform into digital enterprises for the ultimate competitive advantage. Our Digital Enterprise Management solutions are designed to make digital business fast, seamless, and optimized from mainframe to mobile to cloud and beyond. BMC digital IT transforms 82 percent of the Fortune 500 and serves more than 10,000 customers worldwide.

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About opinion.life
opinion.life is an international market research firm driven by the idea that all opinions matter. From the individual, to the communities and workplaces they form, opinion.life uses research and technology expertise to understand the behaviours, attitudes and beliefs that shape our world – www.opinion.life

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SOURCE BMC