While there is a significant interest in cloud among businesses in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), nearly half are struggling, wrestling with increases in cloud integration costs and data silos.
This is according to Oracle's recent report: Putting Cultural Transformation at the Heart of Cloud Success, which surveyed 600 senior IT and line of business decision-makers across Europe and the Middle East.
The study says a growing divide between IT and business is leading many businesses to take the wrong approach to cloud.
More than 60% of a company's overall IT spend is being driven by individual business units versus traditional IT departments, making it difficult for companies to fully benefit from the cloud services they are subscribing to, it adds.
The report notes more than half (52%)of respondents have seen complexity increase as a result of taking the wrong approach to cloud, while 46% said cloud projects have created siloes of data and the same percentage cited a rise in integration costs.
One-third says they had been challenged by complex application development and testing with the cloud.
Additionally, the vast majority of respondents (95%) believe shadow IT is a major cause of complexity.
The findings reveal businesses must rethink their IT funding models and undergo a cultural transformation in order to fully exploit the benefits of cloud computing.aa
Companies are having their expectations met by the cloud in many respects, but their approach to IT investment remains stuck in the past, says Johan Doruiter, senior vice president of Systems at Oracle EMEA.
"The cloud is about seamlessly joining up data and workloads across the organisation and yet we continue to see individual lines of business implement IT systems in siloes. This breeds added complexity and leads to integration issues that could easily be avoided with a more integrated approach."
Roughly one-third of respondents note leaving lines of business to manage their IT-spend independently results in increased security concerns, making funding more difficult to manage, and dilution of the company's control of its IT, says the study.
"The issues companies face with their cloud resources are less to do with the technology itself and more to do with a lack of synchronisation across lines of business, says Doruiter.
Decision-makers in different departments in an organisation are increasingly making cloud purchasing decisions without involving the CIO due to the ease of procurement, he notes.
Rather than being side-lined, the CIO needs to be an integral player in leading the business as it transitions to an enterprise cloud model, delivering a vision for a cloud-based business able to support rapid transformation and innovation, says the report.
Without one IT point-person to unify their cloud investment strategy, companies will continue to struggle with individual departments tugging time and resource in opposing directions, he adds.
To unlock the benefits of cloud, businesses must fix their internal divisions or they will simply be stuck in a cycle of replicating the problems of the past, says the report.
"Implementing cloud at the infrastructure, platform and application layer has great potential to provide seamlessly integrated technology that powers a unified business towards shared goals. But if the business is fractured and fragmented, so will its use of cloud be."
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