AptumIf the covid era taught us anything, it’s that organizations must remain agile, efficient, and carefully consider cloud transformation planning. The third study in Aptum’s four-part Cloud Impact series – A Bright Forecast for Cloud – reveals the real-world business benefits of cloud computing, and how CIOs and IT teams can avoid common mistakes that result in increased cloud expenditure. This includes keeping cloud migrations and budgets on track, and the potential risks organizations face by neglecting to assess, implement, and optimize their cloud deployments.
The cost benefits of cloud transformation
On-premises maintenance can be expensive, arduous, and restrict technical capabilities. Additionally, most businesses do not have the in-house expertise needed to manage and successfully optimize on-premises environments.
In contrast, cloud solutions are flexible and scalable. The Aptum study finds that organizations that include planning and preparation in their cloud transformation reap the economic benefits, with 80 percent of respondents reporting increased profitability when delivering services via the cloud and a further 78 percent citing increases in efficiency due to cloud adoption. As we look to recover from the financial impact of the global pandemic, organizations are turning to cloud to make themselves more agile, accelerate new product deployments, and shrink time to market, which naturally leads to increased revenue and cost reductions.
Planning to avoid unexpected cloud costs
The financial benefits of the cloud are by no means guaranteed. Aptum’s survey highlights the need for best practices to keep costs in line while achieving the efficiencies that we know the cloud can deliver. Fifty-seven percent of respondents say they have experienced higher than expected costs from cloud computing. This is a challenge that many organizations can avoid with sufficient cloud transformation planning.
Where do unexpected costs come from?
The unanticipated costs that are associated with cloud are commonly rooted in three rectifiable issues:
- Form-fitted solutions – When organizations lack an understanding of their data requirements and what workloads are best suited to specific environments, it becomes harder to envisage a transformation’s desired end-state. Without an end-state in mind, organizations often transform with no direction or end-goal.
- Lack of oversight – A lack of thorough oversight and controls can lead to sprawling virtual infrastructures with idle resources, creating virtual resources that cost more than they need to.
- Reactive hybrid setups – Moving inappropriate workloads to the public cloud is a common side effect of poor migration planning and operations. As a result, businesses often end up moving workloads in and out of different environments to see where they best perform on a trial-and-error basis, incurring data egress fees in the process.
Optimization
Generally speaking, cloud deployment costs and complexity expand as infrastructure grows and can increase budgets beyond initial expectations. Additionally, as infrastructure morphs into a hybrid set-up, the likelihood of a business possessing the diverse range of skills needed to manage a variety of infrastructures is slim. This is supported by the study findings, which reveals that 69 percent of respondents want to accelerate their cloud deployments but need expert help.
Maintaining a holistic cloud strategy is crucial whilst deployments accelerate. Without this, it becomes challenging for organizations to understand the right location for individual workloads, resulting in a lack of efficiencies, increases in cloud costs and damages to overall profitability. Organizations must start by assessing the desired business outcomes at the start of a migration journey and continuously optimize workloads with that in mind.
Conclusion
It is safe to say that the cloud provides organizations with the economic means to deliver greater operational efficiency and flexibility by exposing new performance capabilities and access to new market streams. Working with an established managed service provider is vital for businesses to understand their cloud investments’ true value. At Aptum, we encompass best-practice architecture, security, resilience, and cloud-connectivity in our services. Our best-in-class solutions combined with technical expertise enables our customers to understand their cloud architecture and build robust, high-performance cloud strategies that drive business transformation and success.
Follow the link to see the full findings from the third part of 2021 Aptum’s Cloud Impact Study – A Bright Forecast For Cloud.