The IT landscape has been fundamentally redesigned in recent years. The rise of the cloud has even triggered a true revolution. At the same time, complexity has also increased. And this at a time when companies are facing three enormous challenges: learning how to deal with cyber threats, working more sustainably and optimizing costs at the same time. To get a handle on this, they are turning to data. Data that providers and resellers can provide.

Until recently, companies were not really aware of the challenges mentioned above. Cybersecurity was a concern for IT, the environment was not yet a top priority, and the financial side of things presented the cloud as a highly efficient solution. In 2024, the cards look completely different. Some IT managers gagged when they saw their cloud usage come with skyrocketing costs, and there is now a growing realization that a lack of focus on security and sustainability is detrimental to the company’s image. In addition, we are seeing more and more laws that specify exactly how organizations should deal with this.

Fortunately, companies are not alone and can count on a strong ecosystem of partners. For example, vendors and resellers can add additional value by providing the right views and recommendations to their customers. A platform like ArrowSphere can help with this. Not only does it enable more efficient management of cloud services, but it is also equipped with dashboards that bring together information about cloud usage and optimizations.

Below, we take a closer look at the three main challenges companies face and how data can help find the right solutions.

1. Cybersecurity in a complex cloud environment

The impact of cybercrime can no longer be underestimated. Studies predict that the costs of cybercrime will rise to over 10 trillion US dollars worldwide by 2025. If cybercrime were a country, it would already be the third largest economy in the world – after the USA and China. The cloud plays a significant role in the threat landscape. According to IBM, a data breach costs an average of 4.45 million US dollars.

IT managers also recognize that the cloud is a gateway for hackers. Blaming cloud providers does not seem to be an option: Gartner predicts that 99% of cloud security problems in 2025 will be the fault of the customer who purchases cloud services.

Meanwhile, laws such as NIS2 are increasing the pressure further. NIS2 is an EU directive that aims to raise the level of cybersecurity in European organizations to a higher level. Compared to the first NIS legislation, more companies must comply with the new directive. In this context, ArrowSphere contains a lot of information about the security status of a company. Via a dashboard, the platform provides an overview of all implementations in AWS and Azure – with a score that shows how well an organization is secured and where improvements can be made.

2. Optimize cloud spending

When companies take their first steps into the cloud, the costs are usually quite low. It doesn’t take much to get started with the cloud, and it doesn’t require a large upfront budget for a pilot project. However, as the cloud becomes more popular, the number of users and workload will grow rapidly, which means that costs won’t keep up. Turning off the tap is not a good strategy, because the cloud also offers a lot of added value.

As the cloud becomes more popular, the number of users and workload will increase rapidly.

Jerry Baetens, Cloud Director Arrow ECS Belux

It is striking that today, on average, 30% of cloud spending is wasted. So there is a lot of profit to be made here – Gartner predicts that by 2025, companies will invest around 51% of their IT budget in the cloud. For this reason, FinOps is becoming a popular practice. The ultimate goal of this method and philosophy is not to save costs, but to optimize spending in the cloud and make better use of unnecessary costs. To do this, FinOps links data on cloud consumption to the business value that the spending generates.

ArrowSphere is a tool for introducing FinOps into an organization. Here, too, a dashboard shows cloud spending and also shows you recommendations for cost optimization. This is an excellent opportunity for vendors and resellers to have new conversations with customers and strengthen the relationship of trust. A company can then spend the money saved on other applications.

3. Reporting on sustainability

There is no company where sustainability is not at the top of the agenda. On the one hand, because many organizations recognize that they have to take responsibility and because customers expect brands to produce sustainably. On the other hand, because legislation is also increasingly focusing on sustainable practices.

Unfortunately, cloud technology has no small place in this area. In fact, the emissions caused by the cloud are comparable to those of air travel. Although data centers are investing heavily in sustainable energy, the ecological footprint threatens to continue to grow, driven by new, demanding applications such as ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLM). Therefore, efficient use of the cloud in terms of sustainability is important.

From 2025, some companies will also have to report on their environmental efforts. The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) requires organizations to disclose information on what they believe are social and environmental risks and opportunities and their impact on people and the planet. Little by little, more and more companies will have to comply with this directive. Finding the right data is no easy task. ArrowSphere therefore collects all data on emissions associated with workloads. Customers can use this data in reports and analytics to work more sustainably.

We are facing challenging times, but fortunately we also have the data and tools to deal with them positively.

This is a guest post by Jerry Baetens, Cloud Director Arrow ECS Belux. Click here to learn more about the company’s solutions.