Companies shifting their operations to cloud computing infrastructure are lacking out on lots of the supposed advantages of this shift as a result of they don’t know the right way to handle their new preparations. So says know-how start-up Lucidity, which is at present saying a $5.3 million seed funding spherical because it seeks to scale up its enterprise providing cloud administration options to deal with this problem.
“Cloud shouldn’t be a magic bullet that can robotically resolve all of your know-how issues,” warns Nitin Bhadauria, certainly one of Lucidity’s co-founders. “In lots of instances, firms are simply lifting their present processes and techniques, and shifting them to the cloud; they find yourself with lots of the identical issues and challenges.”
The result’s disappointment, Bhadauria warns. “CIOs are promising their CFOs vital returns on funding from cloud, however a lot of them are failing to ship.”
Furthermore, it is a rising downside. The transfer to cloud has massively accelerated over the previous three years, with three clear drivers prompting organisations to shift away from on-premise options.
First, the large explosion in knowledge volumes, significantly in the course of the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath, has massively elevated the calls for on organisation’s knowledge centres and techniques. Second, it has turn into harder to answer that demand amid a worldwide scarcity of semiconductors, which has restricted the supply of {hardware}. And third, many firms are in any case reluctant to make the massive capital investments that the info explosion requires; shifting to cloud preparations successfully allows them to change to managing this know-how by means of working expenditure.
Making the leap to cloud – mimicking the cloud-native companies which have sprung up over the previous 15 years and averted on-premises options altogether – does certainly supply a possible route by means of these points. However that journey should be deliberate and managed fastidiously, warns Lucidity co-founder Vatsal Rastogi.
“Eight in 10 organisations merely carry and shift,” he warns. “However to ship the returns organisations are chasing, you want cloud storage that’s managed neatly.” The analogy, he suggests, is to somebody who strikes home to cut back their hire, solely to find they’re worse off as a result of their furnishings must be changed or they’ve an extended commute. The transfer must be deliberate within the spherical.
The most important downside, Lucidity believes, is that many organisations are paying for a lot an excessive amount of cloud storage as a result of they worry the opportunity of an outage if their knowledge spikes all of the sudden or unexpectedly. Over-provisioning of this kind averages 70%, Lucidity argues, and even then, outages are nonetheless occurring. And with an acute scarcity of cloud specialists worldwide within the know-how sector, most organisations can’t confront these points for themselves.
That’s the place Lucidity believes its product might help. It’s a software program answer that sits on high of the shoppers’ cloud preparations, managing storage in order that it robotically scales in dimension as calls for on it require – and does so in actual time. At a stroke, clients can dump their over-provisioning, Lucidity argues, whereas making certain there might be no outages in any respect.
“Guide cloud administration is resulting in the wastage of 70% of storage prices,” Rastogi says of the financial savings he believes Lucidity can ship. The corporate can also be pleased with its low-maintenance mannequin – it says installations take round quarter-hour, with a further hour of configurations, after which the software program runs robotically without having for additional intervention. Lucidity describes its method as “NoOps”.
Launched in 2021, Lucidity took round 9 months to construct its answer, and has been working with a small variety of enterprises since earlier this 12 months, with 9 clients now at totally different stakes of product deployment. The answer is sector and geography agnostic, although Lucidity is concentrated significantly on the North American market and seems to be attracting most curiosity from companies in monetary providers, retail, know-how, media and leisure.
The subsequent stage for the enterprise is additional product improvement and constructing consciousness and understanding amongst potential clients. “9 in 10 companies don’t realise how a lot cash they’re losing,” Bhadauria says.
At this time’s fund-raising will assist on this regard, offering Lucidity with funding to put money into increasing its engineering and improvement capability by means of recruitment, in addition to in its go-to-market methods.
The corporate’s seed spherical is led by AlphaWave Investments, with participation from Beenext, Blume Ventures, BoldCapital, NuVentures and Sparrow Capital. It follows a $500,000 pre-seed spherical led by Beenext in 2021.
”Lucidity makes cloud storage administration extra streamlined and dependable, and in addition will increase cloud storage efficiency whereas saving a major amount of cash,” says AlphaWave’s Andrew Martinez. “This is not only a theoretical idea, however one thing on full show as proof of ideas with clients now onboarding on the Lucidity platform.”