2016

Cloud Computing continued to grow rapidly in 2016. As we can see here from Synergy Research, the Cloud market is growing at 25% annually. As a company operating in the Cloud market, we definitely saw a lot of new requests for migrations and new Cloud services in 2016. We also saw the services provided by our partners and suppliers increase significantly, making it a lot easier to move companies to Cloud services and provide all the features they need. As we already see from the market, 2017 will continue to grow and new service requests will continue to come in.

During 2015, we saw Cloud become an accepted solution in most enterprises, and in 2016, we saw most of our customers opt for Cloud solutions over classic delivery options. The following are the challenges that we saw our customers deal with the most:

1. Lack of Resources / Expertise

This is a problem that many companies have with Cloud solutions. Very often, we visit a company who has purchased and is using services on the Cloud, but they have not yet migrated their data into the new solution and they are not yet using all the features available to them. To be able to fully take advantage of these solutions, it is important to work with experts to be able to enable all features and integrate all your businesses data in the tool.

In 2016 we spent hundreds of hours migrating data of companies of all sizes to Cloud services that they have purchased, but did not have a full understanding of their use and features. This is why we provided a lot of consulting services as well.

2. Security and Compliance

The main issue with security that we have to do with ensuring that users are following the companies’ standard security practices for company data. Starting to use a Cloud solution can happen very quickly, often before anybody from IT has heard about it. Most users are not able to understand if what they are following company rules or not. It is important to have a process in place to manage these decisions and ensure that data is safe.

For the past couple of years we have developed several solutions to fit the latest security standards in the Cloud industry. One of them is Buncro a file sharing and collaboration platform that we have had great success with in the past year, providing it to clients that need to share their data, but still need premium security while doing so.

3. Managing Multiple Services

2016 saw many companies move to hybrid Cloud solutions. Very often, this meant using 2-3 public Cloud providers in addition to your private Cloud infrastructure. However, your users still come to you to ensure quality of service and performance. Suddenly, your team is expected to be monitoring infrastructure in multiple locations, global public networks, application performance on VM’s you didn’t create, and in addition control IT costs. Service management has a new level of complexity and must be reigned in.

Many of these challenges are quite new for company IT groups. In the past, IT was able to keep very close control over these topics and ensure that nothing happened without them knowing about it. The new service offerings make it a lot more difficult to be able to manage IT in the same way. 2016 has been a year where Business managers are taking advantage of Cloud services, and IT managers are starting to work and manage these new environments driven by business instead of IT.