How businesses battle challenges of Multicloud Environments

A lot of decision-makers at enterprise organisations in the UK & Ireland are struggling with numerous challenges arising from the transmission of data across multiple cloud platforms. These challenges are far beyond discrepancies in identical queries based on cloud hosting the data, exorbitant costs and sluggish data processing speeds hindering prompt insights, and diminished accuracy.

Decision-makers have enumerated multiple reasons for adopting a multi-cloud approach including concerns regarding over reliance on a single cloud vendor, compliance and regulatory requirements and fragmented systems resulting from acquisition strategies.

These challenges include inconsistent answers to the same query depending on the cloud where the data is stored, high costs and compromised accuracy. Furthermore, 80% of businesses acknowledge the need to consolidate regular snapshots of data into a unified pool, while others makes use of different analytics platforms on each cloud, leading to the task of consolidating answers, which consumes significant time and resources.

Paul Jones, Head of Technology at SAS UK & Ireland, emphasizes that these findings raise critical questions for decision-makers who rely on their cloud environments to deliver timely and reliable insights.

From further research and survey, only 30% of the survey participants stated that their cloud and analytics environment is well-equipped to address the problems they need to solve. This implies that organisations with compliance and regulatory requirements might face real dilemmas due to cloud proliferation and its associated challenges if their infrastructure is not redesigned to align with their business needs.

A potential solution to these challenges lies in adopting a unified analytics platform, such as SAS Viya, capable of spanning multiple cloud environments, including on-premise data. This platform can generate high-speed analytical insights from diverse data sources, minimising cloud costs and ensuring a single version of truth.

The research, commissioned by SAS, was conducted by Coleman Parkes between December 2022 and January 2023. The research adhered to the standards set by the Market Research Society. The total number of respondents was 200, all of whom worked for companies with more than 3,000 employees. The survey respondents were decision-makers in data, analytics, and cloud services based in the UK and Ireland.