Infoblox has found that European organizations are lagging behind their global peers in multi-cloud management maturity, according to a new Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) report commissioned by Infoblox, ‘The State of Hybrid, Multi-cloud Management Maturity in Europe‘. At the same time, more mature organizations have significant advantages over their competitors. The report compares the hybrid, multi-cloud maturity of European organizations with the rest of the world, exploring how the region trails and why it’s important to improve.
Based on insights from 1,000 networking and security decision makers and influencers around the world – with European companies making up roughly a third of the respondents – the report underscores the need for European cloud strategists to prioritize investments and establish processes aligned to the hybrid, multi-cloud management maturity model.
Multi-cloud management maturity brings multiple benefits for companies
When asked if cloud networking and security technologies are significantly improving ITOps and SecOps outcomes in the cloud, the results were clear: the top four benefits of technology investments cited were improved uptime and service-level agreement adherence (79%), enhanced cross-cloud visibility (76%), increased speed of service delivery and innovation (76%), and higher line-of-business stakeholder satisfaction (73%).
The results show the potential that multi-cloud management maturity has for businesses, with leading organizations reporting the following benefits:
- Cost efficiency: European leaders are outperforming their peers in terms of efficiency, reducing their cloud costs by 50% more than nascent organizations over the last year.
- Faster time to market: Leading companies are bringing their products to market faster, with 76% of leaders saying they are typically first movers, compared to 12% of nascent organizations.
- Employee and customer satisfaction: Leaders achieve 2.9 times more employee satisfaction and 2.3 times more customer satisfaction goals related to cloud-hosted workloads.
- Improved resilience: 75% of leaders said they had never (33%) or only once (42%) experienced an outage of a cloud-hosted business-critical workload in the past 12 months (compared to 44% of nascent organizations).
- Agile security: When workloads shut down, leading organizations detect problems and recover faster: They are 4.1 times more likely to detect outages in real-time or near real-time (33% vs 8%) and 3.3 times more likely to say they can restore service in minutes vs hours or days (36% vs 11%).
Catch-up potential for European companies
Compared to the rest of the world, European organizations are significantly more likely to be in the least mature cohort (55% versus 44%), although there is some consistency across the globe. This means that European organizations are less hybrid and multi-cloud mature overall. At the same time, European organizations are almost as likely to be leaders as organizations in the other regions (11% versus 12%).
When it comes to network and security tool convergence, once again European organizations tend to have a less-mature approach. Compared to their counterparts in other regions, they were 44% more likely to have a completely siloed approach (26% versus 18%).
DNS both network and security teams to discover and map out active devices and services within the cloud and on-premise environment. Unfortunately the data shows that European organizations are less likely to leverage DNS extensively for discovery and visibility of cloud assets.
“The research shows that most companies in Europe are not realizing their full potential. Compared to their counterparts around the world, it’s time to catch up”, says Frank Ruge, Senior Vice President Europe, Middle East & Africa. “While the gap is not yet insurmountable, it is very significant in areas such as building platform teams, converging cloud networking and security tools, and the use of network core services to improve asset management and security. We can help customers accelerate time to market, meet and even exceed employee and customer expectations, and improve the performance of their workloads by providing a more fundamental level of security than traditional security mechanisms.”
The full report, which includes a wealth of information on how leading organizations are winning their hybrid and multi-cloud transformation and a summary of the characteristics of leaders in this area, can be downloaded here.