According to new Apptio research, the vast majority (92%) of IT leaders prefer the public cloud to legacy on-premises infrastructure.

However, cloud investment decisions are being made in a silo with no reliable data. Nearly half of the companies surveyed said decisions about cloud are made without connection to the rest of the business or business units make their own purchases of cloud instances without IT involvement.

In addition to this, cloud sprawl (or ungoverned spending outside of central IT) is an ongoing issue in organisation. This makes it incredibly challenging for IT organisations to have full visibility into cloud resources and a true, cohesive and cross-functional business strategy around cloud investments, priorities and migration decisions.

IT Leaders: Trainline’s David Stanley on firm’s journey with cloud

Information Age spoke with David Stanley, Director of Reliability with Trainline, at the AWS Summit in London this year about their customer first IT strategy. Read here

“As cloud permeates the enterprise, we see more and more business units requesting — or simply using — cloud services,” said Theo Beack, EVP of Products and Engineering at Apptio.

“With fractured usage of cloud throughout a business, it’s hard to make informed decisions about important IT investments. Apptio for Cloud will empower IT leaders to ensure they are never wasting money on the public cloud and have the data needed to make smart migration decision. As a result, IT is able to focus on broader business priorities.”

Solutions for cloud adoption

Apptio for Cloud provides technology leaders with a clear understanding of cost, utilisation, and capacity of their entire cloud portfolio across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud as well as on-premise investments.

The truth about digital transformation: Cloud and on-premise

In recent years there have been countless examples of how digital transformation is proving to be a great asset to a wide variety of businesses. From global giants like Amazon branching into drone delivery and cashier-less stores to Uber investing huge amounts of capital in self-driving technology. Read here

This family of applications is available in two offerings, currently:

1. Apptio Cloud Business Management (CBM): Cost and resource optimisation across all leading public cloud providers (AWS, Azure and Google Cloud). IT leaders can increase the efficiency of public cloud spending and slash waste from over-purchase and underuse.
2. Apptio Hybrid Business Management (HBM): Building on the insights delivered in CBM, this application delivers visibility into total costs of public cloud and on-premises infrastructure in a single view and in a uniform way. This single view helps IT leaders make informed workload-based cloud migration decisions.

“Nearly all CIO organisations struggle to optimise cloud consumption. It’s helpful that there is a growing set of tools to help you learn how to best leverage cloud platform services and how to identify when your use is suboptimal and overly costly. But this guidance would be far more effective if it could give you real-time insights so that no dollars are wasted,” wrote James Staten, VP at Forrester, in a recent blog post on Apptio’s cloud capabilities. “And firms like Apptio that focus not only on what you spend your money on but what projects you are driving and what business objectives you are striving to optimize are delivering substantially higher value.”