Farmington Hills, MI (PRWEB) January 16, 2013

Logicalis, an international IT solutions and managed services provider,(http://www.us.logicalis.com) is warning CIOs about an emerging and alarming – new trend in IT: Cloud Sprawl. Lured by easy-to-purchase and quick-to-install cloud applications, individual departments are finding and deploying their own cloud solutions.

CIOs dont have to look too far today to see the effects of this bring-your-own-cloud (BYOC) movement employees are tapping into free Google Drive space, free Dropbox space, and free Box.com space giving themselves more than enough online room to store confidential customer sales and other mission-critical data outside the company firewall and outside of ITs control. Inexpensive cloud applications that don’t require corporate approval are walking through the door unchecked as well from CRM to email to marketing automation. Along the way, BYOC has given way to a new, repackaged phenomenon dubbed cloud sprawl as poorly managed end-user cloud purchases and deployments make for fragmented, redundant, unmanaged and inefficient cloud-based outsourcing decisions with little or no input from IT.

As Windows became widely adopted and developers created applications specifically for the Windows OS, an explosive number of physical servers were needed to run individual applications on a 1:1 basis. The addition of X86 servers for application development, testing and QA, all running at low utilization, resulted in a physical server sprawl that demanded lots of racks, power, cooling and, in general, was an environment that became costly and difficult to manage.

Virtualization offered a one-to-many solution which, over time, resulted in fewer racks, less power consumption, lower cooling requirements, less floor space in the data center and a much easier-to-manage ROI. But utilization in virtual environments is still hovering under 20 percent today because virtual servers allocated to temporary departmental projects are rarely reclaimed and reallocated when the projects are completed. As a result, there is a tremendous amount of server space being underutilized. Without the right management tools and processes in place, this problem goes unrecognized by even the most experienced data center managers. This leads IT pros to mistakenly believe they are out of space and deny new departmental IT requests. Departments are forced to find their own solutions, often leading them to adopt easily accessible public cloud offerings.

Weve managed to move from physical to virtual, which introduced virtual sprawl, and now from virtual to cloud, says Kevin Gruneisen, senior director, Cloud and Data Center Solutions for Logicalis. But without proper management and strategies in place, moving to the cloud in an unchecked manner will result in cloud sprawl and a less relevant IT organization overall.

To avoid cloud sprawl and its inherent dangers and costs, Logicalis is helping CIOs to strategically plan and manage their cloud environments, offering experts four important steps that will help mitigate this looming IT crisis.

Four Ways to Avoid the Pitfalls of Cloud Sprawl

1.