2nd Watch Releases Survey on Public Cloud Workload Management Solutions

SEATTLE, WA--(Marketwired - Oct 30, 2014) - 2nd Watch, the public cloud workload management company, today released the results of a survey of more than 500 IT directors and executives. The survey found that even though cloud computing holds the promise of less work for IT departments, a large majority of respondents, nearly 70%, said that managing public cloud workloads was difficult. Of that group, nearly half (30% overall) said it was extremely difficult, while the remainder (40% overall) said it was no more difficult than managing internal systems.

Many organizations rely on commercial third-party tools and services to help reduce complexity with their public cloud environments. The majority of companies (62%) use several commercial tools designed specifically for managing and orchestrating cloud-based workloads and resources. Roughly 20% are evaluating such tools. A mere 3% use strictly home-grown or open-source tools for this purpose. A large share of these tools are provided by respondents' cloud IaaS providers, such as AWS, Azure or Google (50%), while the next largest category (30%) use tools provided by legacy software vendors such as CA, BMC and IBM. Companies are primarily using such tools to monitor and improve end user performance (45%), or to monitor and improve end-user security (32%), over optimizing cloud resources for business agility or for tracking spending.

"We discovered from the survey that many organizations encounter operational challenges after migrating applications to the cloud with their existing tools and service providers," says Joel Rosenberger, EVP of Managed Services at 2nd Watch. "There's a perception that managing IT workloads in the cloud is a snap, but clearly that's not the case. In speaking with our customers, we see that companies are now looking externally for help with integrating processes and tools to manage workloads in the cloud to ensure operational excellence."

Additional highlights from the survey:

Integration for visibility is a major priority: Many respondents (46%) report that their company's cloud management tools are integrated to provide a "single pane of glass" view into cloud risk and usage. About 38% say that their tools are partially integrated for this purpose. The top capability that IT executives report as missing from their public cloud workload management solutions is improved integration to other data sources (41%), followed by better reporting features and metrics (27%).

Cloud tools are bringing ROI: More than half (55%) of IT directors said that they are gaining expected ROI from cloud management tools and services. Roughly 33% said that they haven't quite realized ROI but are on their way.

Managed services are popular:  Most companies use outside service firms to help migrate and/or manage their public cloud workloads (45%), or are evaluating such providers today (39%). Only 15% of companies are managing this process internally.

About 2nd Watch
2nd Watch is a public cloud workload management provider that helps enterprises accelerate adoption of the public cloud. The company's services and tools extend and automate critical workload management processes for the public cloud including: governance, procurement, migration and administration. By combining proven methodologies, industry experts, and patent-pending automation tools, 2nd Watch is currently delivering public cloud workload automation across more than 400 enterprises for more than 60,000 instances. The venture-backed company is headquartered in Seattle, Washington. To learn more about 2ND Watch, visit www.2ndwatch.com or call 1-888-317-7920.