Have you lost control of your cloud spend? How can you get it back?

Since the rapid acceleration of public cloud adoption, which really started in earnest in 2018, organisations across all sectors have had mixed success in moving business applications and data into the cloud.

The pandemic accelerated the migration of many business applications into public cloud, with promises of more flexibility, scalability and cost efficiency. Many organisations incorporated a “Public Cloud First” IT strategy, with some misinterpreting this as “Public Cloud Only”.

What many organisations have since realised though, whether large or small, private or public sector, is that the journey to public cloud is fraught with tough lessons.

The Impacts of cloud costs on your IT OPEX

For some companies, skyrocketing OPEX costs, huge costs to refactor existing applications to be cloud-native, digital transformation programmes that have been hamstrung by legacy business processes, data or technical debt, have seen business case benefits erode to zero or negative value.

Responsible cloud providers were honest with consumers, advising to think carefully about the long term costs of moving, and only move if it was right for your business. I’ve heard Verner Vogels, CTO at AWS, say several times publicly that public cloud will cost you more if you don’t transform your workloads to be “fit for cloud”. Other providers simply pushed for market share, regardless of the long term cost or lock-in implications for customers. 

Not wanting to brand their projects as failures, many organisations pushed on regardless and tried to make projects work, often resulting in suboptimal solutions. Where Agile was an appropriate approaches to software development for brand new cloud applications, remediating legacy “tech debt” in this way, often led to an endless cycle of “we’ll get there, if we ever get there, we might not get there”. The absence of good solution architecture, inappropriate delivery management approach, or lack of financial modelling and controls have also been contributing factors.

Many organisations that have moved to public cloud have understandably decommissioned their on-premise data centres, with those office spaces now being repurposed, leaving no in-house repatriation options. For those with on-premise VMware estates, recent license model changes have also pushed-up the cost of leaving workloads there too.

The right Cloud for your business

To tackle the challenges associated with ballooning IT OPEX costs, a “Right Cloud” approach is needed. “Right Cloud” is a strategic approach to cloud solution architecture, incorporating the most appropriate combination of cloud capabilities relevant to your business needs, backed by a roadmap and visibility and control of costs. This approach uses the most appropriate combination of services for your business needs, rather than an “all-in to one provider” approach.

This might include a combination of Office 365 for basic user productivity needs, low-code applications for nuanced business processes hosted on public cloud, custom apps for customer-facing front-end applications that need to scale rapidly, and on-premise or private cloud for expensive-to-run, static heavy-lifting workloads.

As your provider-agnostic trusted partner, we can provide the Right Cloud solution for your business needs. We balance flexibility, scalability, security and cost, with a “just enough but good enough” approach to architecture, giving you control over your cloud spend and a solution that’s flexible for your business at it moves forward.

Get in touch if you’d like to talk to us about your cloud cost challenges.