Top cloud management challenges  

• Limited visibility and control: Manging workloads across different cloud platforms often leads to fragmented oversight, making it difficult to monitor performance, security and resource utilisation.  
• Unoptimised costs: Without a unified cost management approach, organisations risk overspending due to underutilised resources or misaligned configurations.  
• Security and compliance inconsistencies: Each cloud provider has unique security measures and compliance policies making it challenging to uphold consistency across platforms.  
• Interoperability challenges: Integrating and orchestrating workloads between cloud environments can be complex, leading to inefficiencies.  

To overcome these difficulties, organisations must take a strategic approach, leveraging automation, centralised management tools and cross-functional collaboration to streamline operations and enhance security. 

Recommendations for overcoming cloud management complexities

Successfully managing multiple cloud environments requires a proactive and strategic approach. Below are recommendations to address the common challenges. 

• Identify clear objectives: Establish a well-defined cloud strategy with measurable goals to ensure alignment with business needs and long-term success. 
• Foster cross-functional collaboration: Encourage IT, finance, security, and compliance teams to work together, ensuring cloud initiatives align with operational, financial and regulatory priorities. 
• Prioritise security and compliance: Embed security best practices from the start, implementing standardised policies and proactive risk management across all cloud environments. 
• Continuously optimise: Regularly assess cloud usage, cost efficiency, and performance to refine strategies, eliminate inefficiencies, and maximise value. 

How to future-proof your cloud management strategy

A resilient cloud management approach requires adaptability and continuous improvement.  

• Invest in scalable tools: Select a cloud management platform (CMP) that seamlessly supports multicloud and hybrid environments, providing flexibility as business needs evolve.  
• Embrace automation wisely: Leverage automation to streamline repetitive tasks and improve efficiency while maintaining human oversight for strategic decision-making. 
• Monitor trends: Continuously monitor emerging technologies, best practices and industry developments to ensure cloud strategies remain relevant and competitive. 
• Prioritise training: Equip teams with the latest cloud skills and knowledge to maximise efficiency, security and innovation. 

Measuring the success of cloud management strategies

To evaluate the effectiveness of a cloud management strategy, businesses should focus on the following metrics: 

• Cost savings: Measure reductions in cloud spend over time and compare against budgeted forecasts. 
• Resource utilisation: Track how effectively cloud resources are used, minimising waste while maintaining performance. 
• Performance: Monitor application uptime, response times, and user satisfaction to ensure optimal service delivery.  
• Security incidents: Evaluate the number of security threats detected, mitigated, and prevented to gauge risk management effectiveness. 
• Automation impact: Assess the percentage of routine tasks automated and the resulting time and resource savings. 

While managing multiple cloud environments comes with challenges, the right approach can transform cloud obstacles into opportunities. By leveraging a Cloud Management Platform (CMP), strategic automation and internal training, organisations can streamline the complexities of cloud management.  

Cloud management platform (CMP) overview

A cloud management platform is a centralised hub, enabling IT teams to efficiently manage, monitor, automate and optimise public, private or hybrid cloud infrastructures. As cloud strategies become increasingly complex, companies turn to CMPs to bridge the gap between diverse platforms and unify cloud environments into a single, cohesive platform.  

Benefits of using a cloud management platform

A well-implemented CMP offers more than simplified cloud operations — it enhances efficiency, controls cloud costs, strengthens security and improves performance. Key benefits of CMPs include:

Cost optimisation

Reducing costs doesn’t mean cutting corners on performance. Instead, it’s about making data-driven decisions to maximise efficiency without sacrificing performance. A CMP provides actionable insights to decrease wasteful spending by assisting with the following:

• Identifies unused or underutilised resources to rebalance and consolidate workloads accordingly   
• Easily forecast and scale up or down as demand changes 

Performance enhancements

Real-time monitoring ensures workloads run efficiently, helping avoid bottlenecks and reduce downtime. 

Automate operations

Routine tasks such as provisioning, scaling and workload balancing can be automated, allowing IT teams to focus on strategic initiatives. 

Enhance scalability

CMPs are designed to grow and adapt to business demands, making them a future-proof solution for evolving cloud strategies. 

Strengthen security and compliance

Effective cloud management is pivotal in mitigating security risks and ensuring compliance in today’s threat landscape. CMPs provide built-in governance frameworks and automated policy enforcement to uphold compliance standards and regulations.  

• Centralises security controls by enforcing consistent policies across all cloud environments
• Simplifies compliance audits with automated reporting and governance, including GDPR, ISO 27001 or SOC2.  
• Provides real-time alerts with advanced monitoring tools to detect anomalies or potential breaches before they escalate.

Cloud technologies and infrastructure will continue to evolve, and so will their complexities. A cloud management platform is essential for businesses looking to gain visibility and streamline processes for future agility.  

For over 25 years, Pall-Ex Group has provided thousands of businesses safe and reliable palletised freight distribution services around the UK and Europe. Pall-Ex Group serves customers of all sizes and industries, including manufacturing, agriculture, construction and others. 

With more than 40,000 pallets entering Pall-Ex Group’s hubs daily, the company must have the latest technology to ensure customers know when to expect their next delivery. The company maintains six physical locations to support its robust network in the UK and 5,000 users across Europe. 

Over time, balancing priorities and meeting business demands became a challenge for Pall-Ex’s IT team. To advance its growth initiatives, the company partnered with several maintenance and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers. However, Pall-Ex began to experience poor service quality and instabilities that impacted its customer base and overall business. Consequently, the company started its search for a new partner who could provide the services and support required to maintain the business. 

Collaborative approach to inform decision-making

Pall-Ex partnered with Service Express in 2018 based on a recommendation to the business, the company’s comprehensive service offerings and experienced people who invest in their team’s success. 

The Pall-Ex team was confident in Service Express’ ability to foster business growth and quickly meet business demands. Service Express provides IaaS for the company’s x86 workloads to support its Nexus Core Operational System and MyNexus pallet tracking software. 

Dave shares the tangible results of working with Service Express, highlighting the benefits of migrating to a secure, agile and reliable IaaS solution. “The stability and security of the Nexus and MyNexus platform have allowed us to focus on key business tasks that move it forward. This enables us to deliver strategic projects with advantages over and above our competitors.” 

Ongoing partnership built on quality service and reliability

When reflecting on the several-year partnership with Service Express, Dave emphasises, “The service quality is the main differentiator. I’ve been working with Service Express for more than fifteen years. In that time, we’ve established key relationships. I can count on one hand the number of issues I’ve dealt with over the years. However, when there is an issue, the people within the business take ownership and resolve the problem. Businesses make mistakes, but Service Express seldom makes the same mistake twice.” 

Pall-Ex’s confidence in the Service Express team and service delivery is further proof of the valued partnership. Working with Service Express as an extension of the Pall-Ex team for current and future projects has redirected time, budget and resources to other business priorities.  

Glen Dimplex offers innovative solutions ranging from consumer appliances to industrial heating, ventilation and cooling units. Headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, the company operates in nearly 20 countries across Europe, North America, Australia and Asia. 

After hosting and supporting systems in-house for over 25 years, the company determined it was time to evaluate its IT strategy and approach. Glen Dimplex initially partnered with Service Express for third-party Data Centre Maintenance. Service Express’ knowledge and experience with mission-critical IBM systems influenced the company’s decision. 

Taking the next step toward innovation

After experiencing Service Express’ flexibility and service quality, Glen Dimplex began to evaluate the next steps toward modernising its critical ERP and legacy IBM systems. Service Express and Glen Dimplex worked together to identify a plan to improve resiliency and meet the company’s commercial and operational requirements. 

The next step included migrating Glen Dimplex’s high availability (HA) pairs for several business units into Service Express’ UK-based Tier III and IV by design data centre and colocation facilities. Glen Dimplex received technical support at every step of the migration into Service Express’ availability zones. The shift to Managed Colocation laid the foundation for the journey to Service Express’ fully managed Specialty Cloud for IBM Power solution. 

“The hosting approach meant we avoided €450k of capital expenditure required to replace ageing on-premises hardware. Operating costs also decreased due to a reduction in local IT overheads plus the economies of scale you expect with cloud.” 

– Jonathan Webb, IT Director, Glen Dimplex 

Investing in transformation

Service Express staff and engineers carefully planned and executed the cloud migration from start to finish to mitigate risk and ensure business continuity. Glen Dimplex’s IT staff has redirected time and resources spent updating and managing systems to other business priorities without sacrificing peace of mind. Service Express engineers managed the infrastructure around the clock to maintain resiliency and optimum performance. 

“With the ever-changing cultural landscape and our commitment to sustainability, Service Express has the solutions and team to help us achieve our goals. The support has been first class pre- and post-implementation.” 

– Phil Grundy, Head of Business Systems, Glen Dimplex 

The company looks forward to modernising its IT estate and experiencing the benefits of Service Express’ fully managed and secure solution. This will allow its teams to focus on serving customers and growth opportunities.