Co-authored with   
Robert Dimicco
Senior Director, Advanced Services

How many cloud services do you think your enterprise uses? You'll be surprised: businesses use ~10-15 X more cloud services -unknowingly. This is what we call'cloud sprawl,' because there are too many cloud services in a given environment and not enough visibility or control for the business.

For organizations wanting to better understand their critical business data, this is especially challenging. First, discovering what cloud services are being used, and second, capturing & analyzing the intelligence from cloud services data can be tough. However, the good news is -Cisco can help with these challenges.

Understanding Cloud Sprawl

Cloud Consumption Services can help customers gain a complete picture of their cloud (SaaS, PaaS and IaaS) use as well as understand cloud risks and costs. Want an example? Recently, we conducted a Cloud Consumption Assessment with a global pharmaceutical and discovered that they were using over 650 individual cloud service providers, including:

• 60+ human resource management cloud services
• 40+ finance and accounting cloud services
• Nearly 40 ERP cloud services
• 20+ cloud storage services
• 20+ CRM cloud services
• 10+ different document management cloud services

Gain Business Intelligence from the Cloud

Each one of these cloud sources holds key information about your customers, your employees and your products and services. This global pharmaceutical highlights how hard it can be for organizations to understand their business data in the cloud. In order to have a 360-view of their business, the global pharmaceutical above needed to obtain data from hundreds of cloud providers. To do this manually is extremely time consuming and expensive. The challenge of making business decisions in a multi-cloud world is thateachcloud source createshugeamounts of data. It's about getting access to that multiplied data, no matter where it is.

At Cisco, our customers use Data Virtualization to connect all kinds of data from multiple sources -making it appear as if everything is consolidated and in one place. This has helped us collect cloud data and perform complex queries that have supported better decision-making. For example, another pharmaceutical company, Pfizer, utilized Cisco Data Virtualization to effectively provide information to researchers and managers from many different sources during the drug discovery process. On average, it takes a new drug 10-15 years to go into the market -with each year, discovery and developments commands billions of dollars in research and testing. By using Data Virtualization, Pfizer sped up its process and reduced the time required to develop drug discovery projects by 50% (from 3-4 months to 6-8 weeks!).

So, the million-dollar question: do you know how many cloud sources are in your environment? Come and learn more about how we can help you gain intelligence from the cloud with Cisco Cloud Consumption Services and Cisco Data Virtualization.

Questions? Feel free to reach out to Mike or Bob!