Monday Morning Impact – May 18

Study: Cloud Spend Exceeds Budgets as Covid-19 Spurs Cloud Use

Flexera, an IT management software company based in suburban Chicago, has released a new report suggesting that the use of the cloud has dramatically increased amid the Covid-19 outbreak, and that costs have increased accordingly.

More than half of enterprise respondents to the ninth annual Flexera State of the Cloud Report said their cloud usage will be higher than originally planned at the beginning of the year due to the pandemic. Almost 60% of enterprises expect cloud usage to exceed prior plans due to COVID-19. Organizations are over budget for cloud spend by an average of 23 percent, and expect cloud spend to increase by 47 percent next year.

Companies plan to migrate more services to cloud, despite the fact that they are already exceeding cloud budgets. This is expected to push the emphasis towards optimizing workloads in order to ensure operational efficiency.

According to the survey data, 93% of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy while 87% have a hybrid cloud strategy. Twenty percent of enterprises spend more than $12 million per year on public cloud, and more than 50 percent of enterprise workloads and data are expected to be in a public cloud within 12 months.

The report says 83% of enterprises indicate that security is a challenge, followed by 82 percent for managing cloud spend and 79 percent for governance. For cloud beginners, lack of resources/expertise is the top challenge; for advanced cloud users, managing cloud spend is the top challenge.

The report leveraged a panel of 750 technical professionals from around the globe and across a broad cross-section of industries, providing insight into their adoption of cloud infrastructure. The survey was conducted in the first quarter of 2020.

Channel Impact^®
The survey captures insights into how organizations are progressing in their journey to cloud, which is made even more important due to the global pandemic and the widespread need to work from home.

New RapidFire Tools Solution Designed to Support Work-from-Home Environment

RapidFire Tools, a Kaseya company, has launched the Network Detective Work from Home (WFH) solution, featuring a self-service portal to empower employees who are working off home computers to initiate a network and security scan to be analyzed and documented by their companies’ IT support team before they connect to the corporate network.

“Many businesses were not prepared for the sudden shift of resources from offices to employee homes when the coronavirus hit, and that left many organizations vulnerable to data breaches and internal threats,” said Michael Mittel, president and GM, RapidFire Tools. “We created Network Detective WFH to address this very issue by delivering high-value, self-service assessments that safely allow employees to work from home using their personal devices. With the help of Network Detective WFH, business owners can have peace of mind knowing that the integrity of their IT infrastructure remains in place, and also save money and reduce IT workload by allowing employees to use home computers and networks.”

The offering provides “graded” PC risk scores and consolidated report cards to prevent compromises to the business in areas including:

• Basic IT security protection
• Anti-virus and personal firewall configuration
• Patch management
• Third party applications scanning for potential threats
• Critical asset information for the IT helpdesk that captures computer and network data to make remote IT support a breeze
• A self-service portal that lets employees scan without the assistance of IT
• An option for automatic weekly re-scans and “grading” to ensure the integrity of the corporate infrastructure

Channel Impact^®
While the ability to work from home was once considered a luxury, the current pandemic has closed office buildings and a wide variety of other “non-essential” facilities, thereby forcing people to work from home.  This situation has been the source of a great deal of angst in the IT departments, security teams, and upper management who need to ensure that company assets are accessed safely and with the necessary bandwidth to provide smooth operation.  Offerings such as this one are intended to help validate the security portion of those requirements.

AWS Rolls out SaaS Competency Program

Amazon Web Services has announced the formation of its new AWS SaaS Competency to support customers looking for consultants with deep expertise in designing and building Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions on AWS.

This program allows AWS customers to easily identify qualified APN Consulting Partners with deep expertise and experience in the designing and building of SaaS solutions on AWS. The AWS SaaS Competency includes two categories; Design Services, and Builders. APN partners in the Design Services category have expertise in designing and implementing complex, cloud-native, SaaS solutions with AWS infrastructure. Meanwhile, APN Consulting Partners in the Builders category have deep expertise in building cloud-native SaaS applications via software development.

Regardless of category, participating partners must undergo a rigorous AWS validation process and evaluation of multiple customer references specific to SaaS on AWS. AWS Partner Solution Architects have validated their technical proficiency and architecture for previously completed customer use cases and thought leadership in SaaS.

Channel Impact^®
Given the relative ease with which channel partners can set up shop, AWS and other companies are using such programs as a means of ensuring that partners leveraging their infrastructure and services have the expertise necessary to capably deliver the expected service while maximizing customer satisfaction.