You’ve adopted the cloud, got a high level of storage and moved a lot of apps in – but you’re still not getting as much work done as you thought.
That’s the alarming case with more than half of respondents to an Oracle-conducted survey entitled ‘Cloud for Business Managers: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly’.
54% of the 1355 executives polled said that they had suffered staff downtime as a result of difficulties with cloud integration. In terms of specific numbers, this amounted to 11 downtime situations per department surveyed in the last six months. Struggling cloud integration also affects departments which don’t even use cloud apps, the research found.
Similarly, 54% of respondents also said that deadlines had been missed during the past six months “due to a lack of cloud data being shared effectively around the organisation”. Whether cloud technology can actually be blamed for this one is spurious at best, however it may indicate that companies are not fully getting to grips with its usage.
The report zoned in more specifically on cloud apps and found various statistics:
- One in five respondents believe their cloud apps do not have the functionality they expect
- The same number complain that their cloud apps are not usable on mobile devices
- Companies are on average abandoning one cloud app per year because of integration problems
This all doesn’t exactly make for great reading; particularly given companies are binning their apps due to frustration of integration.
And other figures make for alarming reading. 81% of respondents said they were unaware that, in some cases, a client’s cloud data is not looked after by the vendor they’re contracted to, whilst just under a third (30%) of cloud users said that they had become heavily dependent on IT staff, and that this was hindering their adoption.
The overall conclusion from this report, it would seem, is that adopting cloud technology is only one of the steps needed in improving IT efficiency.
It’s not the first time this has been advocated; with a KPMG survey back in February examining more ‘transformational’ thinking in the cloud – but is it a case of adopters biting off more than they can chew?
