A recent industry study showed that there are currently 5 million developers using cloud as a development platform and that number is expected to double in the next 6 months. An additional 5.2 million developers expect to use Cloud in the next 7 to 12 months or later, and only 4.8 million have no plans at all for using Cloud.

While these numbers are huge, anyone that has been paying any attention to the cloud computing industry over the last year or so will not be surprised by them. The rise of the application economy or digital innovation or whatever you wish to call the need to compete with digital services offered over web and mobile platforms, has led to developers – and more importantly, agile development, becoming crucially important to most organizations. Companies across all industries simply struggle to compete without agile application and deployment processes in place. Developers need fast access to on-demand, scalable IT infrastructure on which to develop and test new applications and public cloud platforms allow them to do just that.

So, what are your developers doing to become more agile? If they’re not jumping up & down & pressuring you for on-demand, scalable cloud infrastructure for their dev projects, they may already be using the public cloud themselves and you may have a Shadow IT issue. While Shadow IT is not bad in itself – as it usually means that developers have taken it upon themselves to get the agile cloud infrastructure they need – it can create all sorts of headaches for IT in terms of security risks, resource optimization issues, lack of visibility and audit failures. IT needs to get their arms around Shadow IT – while ensuring they don’t whisk the agility carpet out from under their developers at the same time.

And, there are now few roadblocks to IT being able to leverage the flexibility & scalability of cloud computing– whether that is via private , public or hybrid cloud models. However, the management part of the cloud puzzle is often still missing from many cloud deployments. Indeed, many of the cloud challenges & failures we see in the market stem from a lack of cloud visibility and management.

IT needs a cloud strategy that combines access to secure, scalable cloud infrastructure combined with a management layer that provides visibility and granular management across cloud resources, performance, security settings, billing and more. That will ensure they are able to get the best of both worlds – the agile infrastructure needed for their dev org and the management control they are used to in their on-premise environment.

Check out the built-in management for the iland cloud available through the intuitive & feature-rich iland Secure Cloud Console here: iland Secure Cloud Console