Editor’s Note: As of January 2022, iland is now 11:11 Systems, a managed infrastructure solutions provider at the forefront of cloud, connectivity, and security. As a legacy iland.com blog post, this article likely contains information that is no longer relevant. For the most up-to-date product information and resources, or if you have further questions, please refer to the 11:11 Systems Success Center or contact us directly.
A recent industry study showed that there are currently 5 million developers using cloud as a development platform, and that number is expected to double in the next six months. An additional 5.2 million developers expect to use cloud in the next 7 to 12 months or later, and only 4.8 million have no plans at all to use cloud.
While these numbers are huge, anyone that has been paying any attention to the cloud computing industry over the last year will not be surprised by them. The rise of the application economy, digital innovation, or whatever you wish to call the need to provide digital services through web and mobile platforms, has made agile development crucial to most organizations. Companies across all industries simply struggle to compete without quick application and deployment processes in place. Developers need fast access to on-demand, scalable IT infrastructure to develop and test new applications. Public cloud platforms allow them to do just that.
So, what are your developers doing to become more agile? If they’re not jumping up and down and pressuring you for on-demand, scalable cloud infrastructure for their dev projects, they may already be using the public cloud themselves and you may have a Shadow IT issue. While Shadow IT is not bad in itself – as it usually means that developers have taken it upon themselves to get the cloud infrastructure they need – it can create all sorts of headaches for IT in terms of security risks, resource optimization issues, lack of visibility, and audit failures. IT needs to get its arms around Shadow IT while ensuring they don’t whisk the carpet out from under their developers at the same time.
There are now few roadblocks to leveraging the flexibility and scalability of cloud computing– whether that is via private , public or hybrid cloud models. The management part of the cloud puzzle is still missing from many cloud deployments. Indeed, many of the cloud challenges and failures we see in the cloud market stem from a lack of visibility and management.
IT needs a cloud strategy that combines access to secure, scalable cloud infrastructure combined with a management layer that provides visibility and granular management across cloud resources, performance, security settings, billing and more. That will ensure they are able to get the best of both worlds: the agile infrastructure needed for their development organization and the management control they are used to in their on-premise environment.
Check out the built-in management for the 11:11 Cloud available through the intuitive and feature-rich 11:11 Cloud Console here.
