Enterprises Turning to AI to Navigate Multi-Cloud IT Landscape

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Is there anything artificial intelligence (AI) can’t do?

Whether helping enterprises tidy up their supply chains or intelligently route help desk tickets, AI is proving to be a powerful ally in running a business today. Now, they can add multi-cloud management to the list.

In a recent survey of 1,000 IT decision makers, BMC discovered that 78 percent of organizations are exploring the use of AI to help them get a handle on their multi-cloud IT environments and the problems they introduce. Chief among those challenges is weighing the budgetary impact of their choices.

“The number one driver for adopting multiple clouds is cost optimization, yet two out of every five IT leaders are completely in the dark on what their organizations are spending on cloud,” Bill Berutti, president of Enterprise Solutions at BMC, said in a statement. Nearly half (45 percent) of those polled said they rely on multiple cloud providers as part of a cost-optimization strategy.

New approaches to IT management are required for CIOs seeking to successfully adapt to the multi-cloud, asserts the BMC executive. In fact, 80 percent of respondents agreed that it was time to shake things up.

“Multi-cloud has truly changed the game: the traditional way of looking at IT infrastructure simply does not work anymore,” Berutti added. “IT leaders must consider new ways to manage multi-cloud environments to ensure they are getting the expected benefits from public cloud in terms of cost savings, automated performance optimization, and increased security and governance.”

Forty-four percent of organizations use more than one cloud in a bid to maintain business agility and 40 percent use the tactic to mitigate risk.

Apart from pinning down the cost of managing multiple clouds, IT organizations also struggle with automation and resource utilization. As always, security and ranks as a major concern. Over the next 24 to 36 months, cloud security is the top area of investment among the survey-takers. Businesses also plan to spend on cloud y capacity optimization, performance management and analytics and cost management, according to the study.

BMC’s findings on the role of AI in multi-cloud management echoes another recent survey from ServiceNow. Nearly half (49 percent) of the CIOs quizzed for study are already using machine learning (ML), a subset of AI, to boost their IT service management (ITSM) capabilities. Sixty-nine percent of respondents believe that decisions made by ML systems are more accurate than those made by people.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.