Shadow IT is rampant. For years, CIOs have known that business groups were circumventing the IT department to access public cloud services they felt they needed to do their jobs. Only recently have CIOs begun to realize the full extent of the cloud sprawl across their organizations and the pitfalls for their business. To help CIOs manage their shadow IT issues, Cisco is launching Cloud Consumption as a Service—a new software-as-a-service product that discovers and monitors public cloud services an organization is using.
Recent analysis by Cisco reveals the extent of the shadow IT challenge. The average large enterprise now uses 1,220 individual public cloud services. That’s up to 25 times more than estimated by IT. And the average number of public cloud services has grown 112 percent over the past year, and 67 percent over the past six months. Even worse, there are significant business risks associated with uncontrolled adoption of public cloud services. These range from regulatory compliance and data protection, to business continuity, cost and service performance.
That’s where Cisco®Cloud Consumption as a Service comes into play. The primary function of the new service is to discover and continually monitor public cloud use across an organization. When combined with detailed and benchmarking from Cisco, this insight helps businesses reduce security risks and better understand and manage costs. This helps IT team to partner more effectively with business groups and make educated decision about the right cloud services for the business.
To help customers understand how cloud governance can be simplified, Cisco is offering a free 30-daytrial.
CityMD: Making Educated Decisions on Cloud Services
CityMD is a fast-growing urgent care organization with 50 facilities across New York City and New Jersey. After using Cisco Cloud Consumption, CityMD were surprised to discover employees were using 522cloud services, with IT only formally supporting 15-20.
“Now that we have full visibility into our cloud usage we can make educated decisions about the services that are right for the business and get a better idea of what risks we may face,” said Robert Florescu, vice president of Information Technology at CityMD. “Our company was founded by ER doctors, so they want cloud services fast. With this information at our fingertips we can partner more effectively with our business groups. We can also proactively ensure we have the appropriate security and compliance measures in place.”
From IT Consultant to Business Consultant
To help Cisco improve the new offering, a number of Cisco partners participated in an early adopter program. Executives at Aqueduct Technologies and World Wide Technology describe the reaction of customers and the potential impact on their business.
“I recently had a conversation with a VP of IT at one of my larger customers. I was able to show him data in the Cisco Cloud Consumption dashboard and he was amazed at services he didn’t realize he was using,” said Chris Jennings, president and chief strategy officer at Boston-based Cisco partner Aqueduct Technologies.“We then had the opportunity to help them identify public, private and hybrid solutions that can impact their business. Cloud Consumption gives us the insight to transform our relationship from an IT consultant to a business consultant.”
"We want to empower customers to monitor and manage cloud services,” said Jim Melton, the technical architect of the Cloud Practice at World Wide Technology—a national Cisco partner headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri.“Cisco Cloud Consumption not only helps with this goal, it also provides insight to help define the next steps in a customer’s cloud journey, and concrete data to build the business case for their cloud initiatives. Cloud Consumption is helping us evolve our customer conversations from products to business outcomes.”
