Companies reevaluating their operations and looking for ways to gain efficiencies and streamline costs look to the cloud to achieve reduce IT costs. Moving to the cloud can be a very effective cost-saving endeavor, but it must be done right. Whether your enterprise has already migrated to the cloud or is in the process, here are some considerations to deliver cost savings without giving up performance.
If You’re Moving to the Cloud And Want To Optimize Costs
When it comes to workloads, there’s been a long-held notion that simply moving to the cloud will save money, but that is not always the case. Lifting a virtual instance from a physical server in your office into the public cloud may even cost more money if the architecture is not considered. While companies are eager to stop managing and maintaining their own servers, the reality is that there was some cost control and flexibility with physical servers. IT managers could oversubscribe resources, sharing capital costs. The lesson to be learned is that simply moving applications to the cloud does not guarantee to streamline costs. Modifying a workload to be cloud-native will save money, and this requires upfront investment. If this is not done, hasty companies could actually be creating a new cost problem when trying to solve for another.
A lift-and-shift approach to workloads will not result in cost savings because there is no one cost solution that fits all enterprise partners. Enterprises must consider the needs of their particular organizations, not just the technology trends of the moment. Building a cloud infrastructure to suit their own needs and business practices are what will make a move to the cloud successful. At Unitas, we approach each client’s cloud strategy and infrastructure by listening to their needs and building accordingly while staying mindful of cost optimization.
If You’ve Already Moved to the Cloud, but Costs Are Out of Control
According to the 2019 RightScale State of the Cloud Report, 94% of enterprise respondents use cloud technologies. These organizations have already begun their digital transformation journey and are spending millions of dollars on the cloud annually. Yet 84% of the same survey respondents say that managing cloud spend and cloud governance are their top challenges, and that their highest priority for 2019 was optimizing their cloud costs. If you find yourself in a position where your company’s workloads have moved to the cloud yet costs are anything but optimized, you’re not alone. At Unitas, we work with clients everyday who are in the same position.
We start by looking at what cloud services you are using. One cloud does not solve all requirements, though luckily there are three types to choose from: Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). Reducing cloud costs may mean moving workloads around to achieve the best cost performance. Next we ask how do you get to a workload once it is in the cloud? You cannot have a cloud conversation without talking about connectivity.
Your cloud infrastructure choice and its location requires a different type of connectivity solution to access it. Cloud access is often seen as an afterthought, when it is actually a critical piece of the cloud optimization puzzle. Network is where costs can be optimized along with performance. Enterprises can look to a partner to optimize their cloud infrastructure to suit their workloads and enable the right connectivity solution to access those workloads. Unitas is uniquely positioned to provide both cloud infrastructure and cloud connectivity solutions for clients as fully managed services. Our connectivity-as-a-service (CaaS) offering has reduced clients network costs by 25 to 40%—a best-cost solution without increasing client staff.
A Managed Service Provider Will Guide You to Cost Savings in the Cloud
It’s key to work with a partner who has an awareness of the end-to-end options in the market that add value without adding cost, and also know how one part of the infrastructure can positively or negatively impact another. The discussions you want to have need to include all of the infrastructure and management of hybrid cloud, from security to network to server infrastructure. This broad discussion will ensure you make the right budget decision, but not make a decision on one point solution that restricts other options in the future.
Unitas partners with our clients to help them achieve cost savings by building them a solution that best fits their business needs whether that is repatriating public to private cloud, migrating from one cloud service to another, interconnecting data in different data centers, or delivering diverse redundant cloud access to your WAN. Each implementation is uniquely customized based on the location, mix of network connections, data centers, private and public cloud, and business policies required by the client.
Since end-to-end managed connected hybrid cloud is what we do every day, start a conversation with our experts on ways to optimize your cloud and streamline costs for your organization.
