Conquering Cloud Sprawl: Empowering Productivity with the Right Strategies
Tackle cloud sprawl and related risks to increase productivity. Here’s how.
In today’s highly collaborative and cloud-based work environment, it’s become increasingly difficult to govern access, data, and teams. John Peluso, chief product officer at AvePoint, outlines just how your organization can stay ahead of cloud sprawl and minimize risk.
The proliferation of hybrid work in recent years has resulted in a surge of new workplace tools, software and platforms to help employees collaborate remotely. As organizations continue to adapt to the changing workplace, the use of cloud software is crucial. With worldwide cloud spending projected to grow 20.7% to a total of $591.8 billion in 2023, up from $490.3 billion in 2022, the use and adoption of these tools and software shows no signs of slowing down as businesses strive to maintain high growth in a more decentralized environment.
However, IT teams and leaders alike must understand the potential downsides of employing cloud-based technologies. According to recent data from Productiv, the average company has a staggering 254 SaaS applications. However, average app engagement over 60 days was only 45%, meaning that less than half of a company’s apps are being used on a regular basis. Further, it’s also reported that individuals are increasingly exploring tools outside of their IT environment to get the job done, with external tools having a 54% engagement rate.
Clearly, employing ineffective or too many cloud technologies can result in difficulties in managing your organization’s teams, data and risk–ultimately impeding visibility and accelerating cloud sprawl. With this, below are some key considerations to stay ahead of cloud sprawl, promote productivity and maintain high growth across your organization.
Staying Ahead of the Collaboration Curve
When it comes to managing your organization’s cloud environment and data, the only way to beat sprawl and associated risk is to be prepared. It’s critical to begin by establishing a proactive approach that anticipates sprawl, sets guardrails to mitigate risk, and meets your teams where they collaborate with the most secure and streamlined tools possible–both for internal and external collaboration.
If you know your organization has high levels of collaboration across teams who may not have the same level of access to sensitive information, be prepared and have your bases covered. IT should anticipate complex patterns and pockets of collaboration and specifically design and automate workspaces within their productivity software, including Microsoft Teams, for example, to manage access and protect sensitive data. Employees are not accustomed to closely tracking how they collaborate across teams and where they’re sharing data throughout your organization, therefore, workspaces should be designed to govern access and collaboration across teams. As a result, you can also gain better visibility into how individuals are working and where they’re sharing data across your organization to inform IT strategy and potential areas of risk.
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Closely Governing External Access
It’s also critical to manage how employees collaborate externally on all fronts. For example, if certain teams are working with a trusted external party or agency on an ongoing project, the data owners must closely monitor this access and workspace. By creating auditable workflows that push permission and access reviews to data owners – every three months or so, for example — you can ensure that external access is prescribed correctly. Expired credentials from concluded projects or past partnerships should be regularly audited, and team members should be routinely prompted to certify that external access should still be granted—and if not, they should have easy options to correct or remove access rights as appropriate.
By establishing this lifecycle to understand who is using your organization’s software, both risk and sprawl can be eliminated. This process consistently ensures that access is under control and unnecessary external guests are removed, keeping data across multiple cloud workspaces organized and secure.
To further keep sprawl at bay, closely consider which parties necessarily require access to your ecosystem and data. First, assess and validate the method and business needs for adding external collaborators to your tenant. Second, enable data owners to regularly review and prune external collaborators as part of your overall access management strategy. Being judicious about which parties are added to your organization’s tenant not only keeps data more secure but also eliminates excessive pile-up of expired credentials and external access points.
Automation: The Productivity Game Changer
To gain better visibility into how employees are sharing data and what’s being created within your team’s workspaces, it is critical to employ automated tools that gather and analyze this data. You can better keep up with high-speed collaboration and manage your organization’s cloud environments by automating functions, including access control monitoring, data management, and system maintenance. Automating these processes can help IT teams gain better insights into how data is being used–on a monthly or even weekly basis, depending on the size of your organization–and provide a holistic view of your IT landscape.
With that being said, automated tools can be a double-edged sword if they’re implemented incorrectly. Although these tools have the power to unlock key insights, potential errors in scripting can unintentionally delete critical data, remove access to those who may still need it, and lead to irreversible damage and vulnerabilities within your cloud workspace. From the beginning to the end of lifecycle management, automation scripts should undergo a rigorous review by your organization’s IT leaders to catch any errors before they occur.
Stay Ahead of the Sprawl
In today’s workplace, collaboration is occurring more often and at higher speeds than ever before, producing incredible amounts of data daily. Particularly with larger organizations, prudently managing cross-collaboration, as well as which cloud software and tools are employed is now a critical undertaking to protect sensitive data.
To maintain growth, IT teams and leaders must equip employees with the cutting-edge tools and software needed to work efficiently in a remote environment. However, when organizations employ too many or ineffective applications in an attempt to streamline productivity, they can lose control and run the risk of creating an unmanageable cloud environment. To create a sleek, user-friendly and safe workspace, less can sometimes be more. With Gartner reporting that less than one-third of organizations have a documented cloud computing strategy, it’s clear that organizations of all sizes must now put the guardrails and strategy in place to stay ahead of sprawl.
When it comes to keeping your cloud environment secure and manageable, it’s also essential to employ a proactive approach before it’s too late to recover lost data or resources. Moving forward, organizations must select the right tools for their workforce that deliver the best insights, simplify automation, and secure critical data – or otherwise run the risk of thwarting growth and productivity.
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