Companies transferring their operations to cloud computing infrastructure are lacking out on most of the supposed advantages of this shift as a result of they don’t know find out how to handle their new preparations. So says expertise start-up Lucidity, which is immediately asserting a $5.3 million seed funding spherical because it seeks to scale up its enterprise providing cloud administration options to deal with this concern.
“Cloud will not be a magic bullet that may robotically remedy all of your expertise issues,” warns Nitin Bhadauria, one in all Lucidity’s co-founders. “In lots of instances, firms are simply lifting their current processes and methods, and shifting them to the cloud; they find yourself with most of the identical issues and challenges.”
The result’s disappointment, Bhadauria warns. “CIOs are promising their CFOs important returns on funding from cloud, however lots of them are failing to ship.”
Furthermore, this can be a rising downside. The transfer to cloud has vastly accelerated over the previous three years, with three clear drivers prompting organisations to shift away from on-premise options.
First, the massive explosion in information volumes, significantly in the course of the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath, has vastly elevated the calls for on organisation’s information centres and methods. Second, it has develop into tougher 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 information explosion requires; shifting to cloud preparations successfully permits them to change to managing this expertise 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 provide a possible route by means of these points. However that journey should be deliberate and managed rigorously, warns Lucidity co-founder Vatsal Rastogi.
“Eight in 10 organisations merely elevate and shift,” he warns. “However to ship the returns organisations are chasing, you want cloud storage that’s managed well.” The analogy, he suggests, is to somebody who strikes home to scale back their lease, solely to find they’re worse off as a result of their furnishings needs to be changed or they’ve an extended commute. The transfer needs to be deliberate within the spherical.
Lucidity co-founders Vatsal Rastogi and Nitin Bhadauria
The largest downside, Lucidity believes, is that many organisations are paying for much an excessive amount of cloud storage as a result of they worry the potential for an outage if their information spikes immediately or unexpectedly. Over-provisioning of this sort averages 70%, Lucidity argues, and even then, outages are nonetheless occurring. And with an acute scarcity of cloud specialists worldwide within the expertise sector, most organisations can not confront these points for themselves.
That’s the place Lucidity believes its product can assist. It’s a software program resolution that sits on prime of the shoppers’ cloud preparations, managing storage in order that it robotically scales in measurement as calls for on it require – and does so in actual time. At a stroke, clients can dump their over-provisioning, Lucidity argues, whereas guaranteeing there will likely 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 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 strategy as “NoOps”.
Launched in 2021, Lucidity took round 9 months to construct its resolution, 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, expertise, 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.
Immediately’s fund-raising will assist on this regard, offering Lucidity with funding to spend money on 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 big sum of money,” 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.”