6 Cloud Strategy Pitfalls

and How to Avoid Them

The cloud’s greatest benefits can quickly
become drawbacks without a strong
cloud data strategy
Organizations in virtually every industry are abandoning As with all technology, the cloud comes with its share
their legacy, on-premises data centers and moving of challenges and risks that can jeopardize not only the
workloads and data to the cloud. They are seeking to expected gains of a cloud strategy, but also the whole
optimize costs and deliver new solutions to meet the customer experience. The key to getting maximum value
rapidly evolving needs and expectations of employees from the cloud largely comes down to how effectively
and customers. To do so, organizations are building an organization is able to manage their increasingly
cloud strategies focused on modernizing their tech complex application portfolio and related infrastructure.
stacks through multi-cloud environments and cloud- Only after the massive amount of data produced by
native application adoption. cloud-based systems is appropriately managed and
analyzed can a cloud strategy deliver the promised
The benefits of the cloud can be far-reaching and
value to the organization.
significant. The cloud saves organizations money,
improves and accelerates innovation, and makes them To reach this level of success, every organization
more agile in reacting to market trends and competitive must learn to avoid the pitfalls associated with cloud
pressures. Even well established organizations are adoption. We’ve identified six of the biggest risks, and
becoming “digital first” — requiring them to make with this guide we hope to help you navigate your cloud
significant technology investments to meet customer journey successfully.
expectations. It’s a necessity for survival in the
hypercompetitive market of digital upstarts and
economic volatility.

6 Cloud Strategy Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them | Splunk 2

Cloud Benefits and Pitfalls
Pitfall #1: Runaway Costs
One of the most commonly-cited benefits of the cloud is its ability to drive cost savings, while shifting budget from
CapEx to OpEx. But if you don’t implement proper controls, spending on cloud services can quickly get out of hand.

Benefit all of which drives up cost. In fact, one-third of cloud spending is wasted. on
idle or overprovisioned cloud resources in 2019. Even worse, organizations
A key benefit of cloud technology is its ability to shift how organizations spend
often find themselves spread across multiple cloud providers — either
money to support their applications, from fixed capital expenses to operating
deliberately or accidentally — with little ability to compare costs on a
expenses that are directly tied to usage. Given the long procurement lead
workload basis. It is often difficult to determine not only where expenditures
times and high fixed costs of many IT departments, IaaS and PaaS offerings
are going, but also what value the organization is getting from them.
are a compelling alternative. Cloud gives organizations the ability to efficiently
scale operations in tune with demand while accurately aligning costs
with need. Data Strategy
It is important to develop a data strategy for your cloud strategy. Your
Pitfall organization must accurately forecast and monitor cloud spending to
maximize return on investment and ensure cloud costs align with intended
While as-you-use-it, consumption-based pricing has the potential to be more
budgets. By centralizing the overall cost management of your cloud services,
cost-effective than on-premises infrastructure strategies, organizations
you can identify inefficient jobs, duplicated workloads and other unnecessary
that plan poorly and fail to properly monitor their cloud environments can
expenses before they spiral out of control. Observability capabilities are key
quickly see costs spiraling out of control. The primary issue often relates
here to understand the where and why of points of failure in increasingly
to poor visibility into how cloud instances and services are used: Many
complex systems. The right observability platform can normalize and
organizations allow decentralized groups to procure and manage their own
consolidate usage reporting, regardless of where the cloud services are being
cloud environments. While this strategy gives these individuals or teams the
used. Ultimately, if you treat every implementation of a cloud application
autonomy needed to experiment and tailor the environment to their needs, it
like an independent business decision, you can continue to support group
also leads to significant gaps in oversight. Services may be overprovisioned,
autonomy and still avoid nasty surprises on your cloud bills.
licenses may go unused, and cloud servers may be unnecessarily duplicated,

6 Cloud Strategy Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them | Splunk 3

Pitfall #2: Trading Accelerated Innovation for Stability
Introducing cloud-native DevOps practices promotes rapid innovation and fuels transformation, but also introduces
new potential points of failure.

Benefit wasted on debugging software failures.” In other words, failing tests cost
the enterprise software market $61 billion annually. Further, moving faster
In a traditional, on-prem datacenter environment, infrastructure is largely
without maintaining visibility can result in reduced stability and hindered
determined by periodic budget cycles. New ideas that require additional
cloud adoption.
hardware or software resources but are generated outside of standard
budgeting operations must be delayed until the infrastructure is made
available — stifling innovation and reducing competitiveness. Cloud Data Strategy
infrastructure and services can be spun up quickly to support the rapid pace
Implementing new service and application architectures also means capturing
of innovation.
the new data streams that emerge. These new streams of data from sources
such as serverless functions and microservices offer potential answers to
Pitfall issues that could arise in your cloud environments. The key is to make all of
your data observable across all cloud platforms and legacy dependencies.
When an organization adopts agile development and DevOps principles, they
Again, the key is observability. If you can’t see and understand what’s
move from infrequent releases of monolithic applications to much more
happening in real time from all of your data, you won’t be able to take the
frequent releases of distributed, cloud-native applications. The additional
right action for your operations. The goal is to be able to identify and monitor
complexity can be difficult to manage because cloud-native applications,
not just the “known knowns,” but the “unknown unknowns.” Done properly, it
with their complicated interdependencies and distributed design have more
will allow you to quickly locate the root cause of problems while supporting
points of failure. Further, many of these new cloud apps extend and depend
the desired rate of deployment, improving scalability and expanding the
on existing backend systems, creating a complicated service delivery pipeline.
overall effectiveness of your business processes — providing you both speed
Troubleshooting in this environment can quickly become overwhelming. In
and stability.
fact, a recent report found that “620 million developer hours a year [are]

Our previous lack of visibility prevented us from moving at a fast pace,” Kinwar says. “But Splunk supports the
team velocity to develop products and features faster while giving us the confidence to release sooner.”
—Jishnu Kinwar, VP of Cloud Platform Engineering, Arlo

Read the Arlo Story

6 Cloud Strategy Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them | Splunk 4

Pitfall #3: Creating a Cloud Strategy Without an
Associated Security Strategy
While the vendors themselves have world-class security postures, cloud-native solutions and DevOps
facilitates “going fast and breaking things” — which can deprioritize security.

Benefit While the cloud indeed offers solid security and some visibility into how data
is stored and processed, it also comes with a certain opacity. Coupled with an
Pre-approved cloud vendors have made it past security checks and allow
expanding attack surface, this makes for a potentially weak overall security
for security teams to approve development and infrastructure needs quickly
posture. Additionally, as an organization’s data becomes dispersed across
and with confidence. Cloud vendors unilaterally meet stringent compliance
multiple clouds as well as their own datacenters, security becomes even more
requirements and leverage their scale to fund security teams that often
difficult to understand and control. Finally, as teams sprint ahead with digital
exceed the capabilities of even sophisticated enterprises. They also offer tools
initiatives, they sometimes overlook general security requirements as they
that provide visibility into how your data is stored and processed. Because
are focused on meeting their own. All of this leads to an overall increase in
organizations can spend less time and money worrying about infrastructure
risk — particularly if the organization is not up to speed on network controls,
security, a shift to the cloud also translates to lower costs and faster
access management systems or configuration options. Who is responsible for
realization of value.
managing this risk? What happens if no one is?

Pitfall
A secure platform means nothing if it’s not managed correctly. Gartner says
that “the challenge exists not in the security of the cloud itself, but in the
policies and technologies for security and control of the technology. In nearly
all cases, it is the user, not the cloud provider, who fails to manage the controls
used to protect an organization’s data.” As such, “CIOs must change their line
of questioning from ‘Is the cloud secure?’ to ‘Am I using the cloud securely?’”

6 Cloud Strategy Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them | Splunk 5

Data Strategy
A strong cloud security strategy is the bedrock of a solid cloud data strategy,
letting you retain control over your data while empowering the right people to
contribute to managing security risk. This does not only apply to the normal
operational data classically associated with security, but to sensitive customer
and business data. Cloud and security strategies must go hand in hand
because it allows for a concerted effort that delivers on business needs while
accounting for security controls across different teams working on different
digital initiatives. Teams should have the ability to identify and remediate
issues that are generated from multiple locations through a single, centralized
platform regardless of the type of application. The best practice is to source
and leverage a data platform, which provides you with a security posture
defined by unified cloud security and provides visibility into all of your data
controls across a multi-cloud environment.

The largest gain was through securing at the edge,” Bell says. “This removed the need for individual
dev teams to come up with edge protection models for public-facing endpoints.”
—David Bell, Manager, Infrastructure and Cloud Services, REI

Read the REI Story

6 Cloud Strategy Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them | Splunk 6

Pitfall #4: New Tools Without a Cohesive Approach
Cloud solutions come with their own, purpose-built management tools, optimized for their service experience
without consideration of other providers or existing IT management tools.

Benefit Data Strategy

The cloud is designed to save money in part because it frees you from the need Organizations need tools that will keep them competitive, but that can’t
to rely on legacy, on-prem tools and applications. Less overall management happen without a holistic approach that accounts for existing infrastructure.
with the tools that are included with your chosen cloud platforms means IT and The right cloud data strategy should be centered around the idea of bringing
security teams can focus their energy on other parts of the business, saving the old and new world together via a single data platform that captures the
time and reducing expenses. whole picture. It must offer resilient capabilities on the back of AI and machine
learning to continuously analyze all of an organization’s various cloud services
in context, particularly where existing legacy tools may still be used. Only then
Pitfall can an organization truly automate the identification, classification, prediction
Vendor-centric cloud-based management tools are rarely designed with and self-healing of a variety of technical and business issues before they
compatibility for multi-cloud environments in mind. As such, the typical become major problems. Only after an organization moves away from simply
business earnestly adopting cloud will often find itself relying on some responding to issues and manipulating older technology in attempts to solve
level of legacy technology to attempt to fill the gaps. When this happens, modern problems can it work toward truly modernizing itself.
an organization can find itself spending more time manipulating their
existing toolset than actually leveraging the capabilities of the cloud for
transformation. What’s more, since these legacy tools weren’t designed to
support the modern application architectures that have been made possible
by the cloud, they lead to fractured and inaccurate awareness. In the end, an
organization has less visibility into its operations and poorer response times
that result in increased downtime, more frequent performance issues and an
overall increase in risk.

6 Cloud Strategy Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them | Splunk 7

Pitfall #5: Spreading Yourself Too Thin
There is no shortage of cloud-based point solutions, and if left unchecked, you may end up subscribing to all of them.

Benefit Ultimately, an enterprise can find that cloud technology culminates in a more
complex and costly environment, that is actually more challenging to monitor.
Once you begin investing in cloud technology in earnest, it’s easy to adopt an
Your business and teams might feel spread thin and unable to manage the
enterprise mindset that shifts from “cloud-first” to “cloud-always.” Whatever
sprawl effectively.
problem your business encounters, there’s probably a cloud-based solution for
it, and you can always change them as the need arises. Armed with a myriad
of cloud-based apps and services, organizations find themselves prepared to Data Strategy
tackle anything — improving IT operations, security posture development and
Letting individuals and teams define their own needs is key in how
ultimately the business model itself.
organizations manage their operations, provided they have a data platform
that provides a single, centralized way in which to view them. This platform
Pitfall should not just connect to multiple external platforms, it should also provide a
single surface in which IT, security, DevOps and various business functions can
There may indeed be a cloud solution for anything, but not a single solution
all maintain visibility in order to respond accordingly. Through a centralized
for everything. Not adopting a comprehensive monitoring and observability
management platform, stakeholders can observe and manage the increased
strategy will leave your organization scrambling to maintain clarity into the
volume and velocity of data and better decide what cloud solutions work, and
health and availability of your cloud services. The freedom of individual teams
which are unnecessary. The goal is to have a lean infrastructure both on-prem
to acquire their ideal point solution can quickly lead to silos and data overload
and in the cloud — avoiding bloated tech stacks with several solutions that
as analysts are forced to contend with an exponentially increasing number
compete to do the same thing while adding to overall complexity.
of data feeds and alerts, with no comprehensive plan for managing them.

Before Splunk, logging was done in a disjointed manner. The lack of cohesiveness made it difficult to have an overarching
perspective. As we mature with it, it’s become apparent that Splunk is the solution for our broader issues.”
—Antonio Guedes, Security Analytics Senior Lead, Mars, Inc.

Read the Mars Story

6 Cloud Strategy Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them | Splunk 8

Pitfall #6: Leaving Value in Your Data
Your organization misses the opportunities that come from generating a lot more data when
you can’t effectively leverage it to take action.

Benefit systems. The result in these cases isn’t a glorious digital transformation, but
rather a data ecosystem that is more complex than ever, with costs that are
Cloud technology allows organizations to digitize more interactions, build
not adding value. Having information scattered and siloed across multiple
apps in new ways and capture more data than ever before. If harnessed
systems without a strategy for extracting value from the data is a huge
correctly, this data can be transformative, offering a bounty of insights
opportunity cost.
previously unavailable to the business, and enabling enhanced customer
engagement, better employee productivity, greater uptime and streamlined
operations. Organizations that emphasize data use add an average of 5.32% Data Strategy
to their annual revenue, due directly to better data use, according to Splunk
You can’t undertake digital initiatives without a clear understanding of your
and ESG research.
organization’s data. So-called “dark data” — generated both from technical
and business systems — must be organized and made centrally accessible
Pitfall for the organization to use as needed. Harnessed effectively, this data can
generate business improvements ranging from faster response to service
Having data does not mean it comes with value built in. It has to be processed,
interruptions to improved service offerings for customers. Where is this dark
analyzed and understood to realize its value. A huge amount of the data
data coming from? Mobile apps and microservices, newly connected systems
produced in an organization remains dark — data that is untapped, unused
like mobile POS, cloud monitoring tools, new system integrations and more. By
or undiscovered. Many organizations are simply unable to effectively and
leveraging a platform that can make use of real-time data feeds such as these,
efficiently harness the vast amounts of data generated by cloud-driven
organizations can position themselves for a successful cloud journey.

We’re at the level of granularity now where we can go to any position on the security lane and completely understand
its performance. We can ask questions of the data: ‘How can we improve on yesterday’s ontime performance?’
‘What were the reasons for the shortfalls?”
—Alex Webber and Paul Bannister, IT Development Specialists, Gatwick Airport

Read the Gatwick Story

6 Cloud Strategy Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them | Splunk 9

A Smart Cloud Strategy Requires
a Data-to-Everything Platform
Becoming a cloud-native organization isn’t always a guaranteed fast track collection, allowing you to instantaneously index your critical business data,
to success. It comes with significant challenges that you need to plan for if while providing configurable alerts that bring potential trouble spots to your
you want to avoid runaway expenses, management complexity and data attention. As organizations modernize and embrace cloud native architectures,
overload. One of the central success factors in promoting long-term success platforms like Splunk can become a centerpiece of your operation’s resilience,
during a cloud journey is ensuring that all of your disparate data sources — and the key to helping you get real benefits from your infrastructure, assets
from multicloud to sensor data to customer interactions — are immediately and data. Only the right data platform can help you avoid pitfalls during your
accessible and observable to the organization’s critical stakeholders. journey in the cloud, creating a robust data backbone upon which you can
truly innovate.
This isn’t a trivial task, and it can only be done successfully with the right
platform. Splunk, the Data-to-Everything Platform, is designed to meet you at
every stage of your cloud journey. Splunk is agnostic to whether information
is located in your on-prem data center, in a public or private cloud platform,
or in the business-driving applications you develop and manage. It enables
expansive, real-time data access, powerful analytics and automated

6 Cloud Strategy Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them | Splunk 10

So what’s the fastest way to overcome
these six pitfalls? Investigate, monitor,
analyze and act with Splunk Cloud.

Learn More

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