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Survey highlights how industry practitioners are grappling with cloud network visibility, security, costs, and the skills gap
SANTA CLARA, Calif. – January 30, 2024 – Aviatrix®, the cloud networking expert, today released its 2024 Secure Cloud Networking Field Report. The survey report reveals the challenges facing today’s cloud, networking, and security practitioners, and provides insight into how enterprises can overcome them.
While most companies are now deploying cloud-based technologies, the survey uncovered that there’s a silent struggle to maximize value from those investments. Many of the challenges organizations have faced over the past several years have evolved, but continue today.
Among the key findings:
- Cost and visibility are the top barriers to cloud. Respondents report that “cost controls” and “visibility and troubleshooting” (both 45%) are the biggest hurdles to their organization taking full advantage of cloud (i.e. where they are burning the most man-hours ).
- Legacy approaches and lagging skill sets are causes for cloud security concern. More cloud network outages were caused by firewalls (31.2%) than cyber-attacks (15.3%) in the past year. In addition, human error caused 47.1% of outages.
- Unrealistic cloud budgets are resulting in cost overruns and concern about the implementation of generative AI (GenAI) initiatives. 30.2% report their organization’s AI initiatives have increased planned investment in cloud. But another 38.4% report AI initiatives have not impacted cloud budgets (25.8%) or even decreased them (12.6%).
- The cloud skills gap remains strong. 62.6% report their company has struggled to hire the necessary candidates to support cloud initiatives within their organization. 65.7% of respondents reported that they have struggled to find educational resources for learning about high-demand skills such as multicloud network architecture and design.
“Cloud networking and network security have been thought of as utilities – essentials like electricity that enterprises rely on to run their business and just expect to work,” said Chris McHenry, Vice President of Product Management at Aviatrix. “But as we’ve seen from the practitioners behind the infrastructure, there’s still a of complexity in the cloud that is ultimately impacting businesses’ bottom lines.”
This year’s survey included more than 400 global respondents spanning security, cloud, networking roles, with several reporting they hold more than one of these roles at their organization. More than 50% of the respondents were from enterprise organizations with more than 2,000 employees.
To download the full 2024 Secure Cloud Networking Field Report, visit this link. Aviatrix will also be talking through the findings with industry practitioners and experts in an upcoming webinar on February 13 at 9:00am PT/12:00pm ET. For press and analyst inquiries, please contact Aviatrix at [email protected].
About Aviatrix
Aviatrix® is the cloud networking expert. We’re on a mission to make cloud networking simple so companies stay agile. Trusted by more than 500 of the world’s leading enterprises, our cloud networking platform creates the visibility, security, and control needed to adapt with ease and move ahead at speed. Combined with the Aviatrix Certified Engineer (ACE) Program, the industry’s leading multicloud networking and security certification, Aviatrix empowers the cloud networking community to stay at the forefront of digital transformation. Learn more at www.aviatrix.com.