January 31, 2022
As a midsize enterprise, you have unique needs in selecting a cloud vendor and achieving your cloud goals. Most cloud vendors tout benefits such as enabling you to modernize your infrastructure, achieving costs savings, providing scalability, reducing technical debt, and keeping abreast of the latest technologies. Unfortunately, without proper planning and continued monitoring, you may not achieve the promised benefits.
Following the five steps below can help you achieve your cloud goals:
Develop a cloud strategy to set expectations upfront, creating a baseline to measure against actual consumption. Develop and run this process before deploying applications, projects, and workloads in the public cloud.
Implement a regular cadence to track and maintain visibility into cloud spending. Hold stakeholders accountable to analyze expenditures, explain variances and identify any anomalies.
Based on the visibility gained from the spending metrics, review the option to reduce monthly spending. For example, can legacy applications be optimized to reduce costs? Many midsize businesses moved to the cloud using a “lift and shift” approach, simply moving the applications without optimization. In addition, look at discounts offered for long-term commitments.
Optimizing cloud spending goes beyond tactical cost reduction techniques. Cloud services can often deliver more-favorable ROIs than traditional services. Look at using multiple cloud services to store data. Each storage service may be provided with different tiers at different prices depending upon the level of availability, functionality, and retrieval latency.
Continue to update your cloud strategy as your business and technical requirements change. Make stakeholders accountable to report, reduce and optimize spending, including projects created by individuals in your organization. Review Key Performance Indicators for similar enterprises to compare your spending against industry averages.
If you need assistance in reducing your cloud costs or reviewing your cloud strategy, we are here to help. Contact one of our pros today who understands the midsize enterprise market.