While plenty of enterprises have now stored their information in the cloud, data silos still loom as a major problem. According to a recent Oracle survey, 54 percent of IT executives have experienced downtime in the past six months after being forced to stop working when cloud applications were not properly integrated with other apps across the enterprise.
Cloud silos emerge when data is stored in separate servers or data centers and can't interact with other systems. The reduction in efficiency means enterprises may be failing to meet their potential, but a new cloud management tool aims to change that.
CloudAware recently announced the launch of its software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution -- the first socially-enabled cloud management tool for the enterprise. CloudAware aims to eliminate cloud silos and allow employees to collaborate via social tools, making IT services and everyday business operations run more socially and smoothly.
Employees can access feeds that alert them to key issues and collaborate using a social interface built on Salesforce's Chatter. The solution detects every change made in the cloud, who made it and when. It then broadcasts the changes and archives them for quick reference.
For instance, if an employee makes a dangerous password change, CloudAware would post the change to the feed, and security team members could then view the issue, comment, and take steps to fix the issue.
Today, 54 percent of companies using cloud apps say they've missed project deadlines because of an inability to share data -- happening nine times over the past six months on average. With CloudAware, businesses can create faster deployments, create custom triggers to initiate approval processes, approve or reject changes using mobile devices, and leverage over 100 pre-built best practice workflows. The solution is compatible Amazon Web Services, but will be compatible with Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine, and Open Stack in the future.
According to founder Mikhail Malamud, the company has increased its revenue by more than 150 percent since January and is currently working on partnerships with Amazon Web Services providers in the U.S., Australia, Korea, Japan, Singapore, Finland, and Brazil.
As cloud technologies continue to improve in the enterprise, this solution could stand to significantly improve how Fortune 500-level IT departments communicate interdepartmentally and externally.