Enterprises’ need for control and visibility still slows cloud adoption

During the current COVID-19 crisis, enterprise dependency on cloud platform providers (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform) and on software as a service (Salesforce, Zoom, Teams) has increased. Operators report booming demand, with Microsoft’s Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella saying, “We have seen two years' worth of digital transformation in two months.”

This success brings it with new challenges and some growing responsibilities. Corporate operators tend to classify their applications and services into levels or categories, which defines what they might require for each one in terms of service levels, access, transparency and accountability. Test and development applications, shadow IT, and smaller and newer online businesses were the initial and main drivers of cloud demand in the first decade, and these have relatively light availability needs. But for critical production applications, now the biggest target for cloud companies, enterprises have expectations and compliance requirements that are far more stringent.