M&As are an ideal time for optimizing your company’s cloud usage.
The urgency of cloud optimization during business restructuring
Business restructuring events like mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures are an ideal time to pursue cloud optimization. Forbes reports that over 30% of an organization’s cloud spending is wasted on unused or underused resources. Beyond looking for redundant costs, organizations should evaluate application performance, network reliability, security, and other vital factors to improve organizational agility in the Cloud. Additionally, a streamlined cloud environment boosts the productivity of developers and employees in general. CBTS provides cloud guidance to help you make the most of your newly merged (or divested) IT environment.
There are several common obstacles to achieving cloud efficiency, including:
- Lack of visibility into unused systems or resources
- Legacy applications and infrastructure
- Lack of automated resource tracking tools
This post will review the categories of cloud efficiencies to consider during restructuring, and some of the tools that can help achieve optimum results.
Types of optimization
Cost
Pricing for cloud services tends to be complicated, with variables like demand, time, and location affecting the cost of the same services across regions. Overspending can quickly become a concern in an inefficient cloud environment. To side-step this issue, many organizations implement a multi-cloud solution that maximizes cost benefits by picking and choosing the lowest rates and appropriate services across multiple cloud vendors.
However, there are two downsides to this approach:
- Your organization may miss out on volume discounts from a single vendor.
- Your company may incur additional charges in moving data between cloud vendors.
Cloud providers offer built-in tools that can monitor your usage and spending. But cloud vendors stop short of advising you on how to optimize costs. The experts at CBTS can advise your organization on building an effective and efficient cloud strategy.
Operational
There are many hurdles to operationally efficient cloud computing, such as:
- Legacy applications and architecture.
- Inefficient, non-integrated tools.
- Out-of-date applications that are not regularly patched.
- Unauthorized application installation and usage (aka shadow IT).
Shifting away from legacy applications or on-premises infrastructure can significantly increase productivity by embracing cloud-native development and deployment. Streamlined, integrated, and secure applications go a long way in maintaining efficiencies. Keeping those applications up to date with regular patch management ensures your users enjoy the latest application features with secured vulnerabilities.
Performance
Maintaining the performance of a cloud environment is complicated, relying on many factors, including cloud architecture, network traffic and latency, and the type of cloud service utilized. For example, in some cases, serverless computing may perform faster than a traditional virtual machine (VM). Also, updating code bases to function in a cloud-native environment can drastically improve performance speeds but may be a costly and lengthy undertaking.
Reliability
Lost data is the bane of any IT department; cloud computing is no different from on-premises computing in that regard. Many cloud service providers offer geo-redundant instances to back up enterprise data. However, deploying multiple workload instances across a region can quickly lead to overspending.
In this case, working with a third-party provider like CBTS is best to implement a robust and affordable Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution.
Read more: Seven tips and tricks to manage disaster recovery solutions for the Cloud
Security
Security in cloud environments is a double-edged sword. While cloud storage and networks are vastly more secure than their on-premises counterparts, cloud computing also has exponentially more points of presence (PoP) that a bad actor could manipulate. Establishing and maintaining air-tight security ensures your organization does not suffer from service disruptions and other potential consequences of a data breach or malware attack.
Learn more: Focusing on security in digital transformation
Cloud optimization tools and techniques
1. Vendor tools
As previously mentioned, major cloud providers offer various built-in tools to analyze usage and spending. Even a close read of a monthly bill can provide insights into potential redundancies and overspending. CBTS, as a third-party managed cloud provider, is vendor agnostic. This lets us objectively advise and analyze vendor tools and reports and make recommendations that balance cost with performance and other cloud optimization factors.
2. Application modernization and cloud migration
Aging legacy applications and hardware can lead to ingrained inefficiencies. The only solution is to migrate applications, systems, and processes to the Cloud. Identifying how much and when to migrate are vital considerations that must also be balanced with budget concerns.
CBTS experts specialize in application modernization and cloud migration. Whether fully refactoring an application, performing a lift and shift migration, or implementing microservices or containers, CBTS has the experience and skill to guide your organization through modernization.
Read more: CBTS application modernization services bring your company into the digital age
3. Right-sizing cloud services
Right-sizing is essentially a fancy way of saying that the services should match the need. Your IT team (or managed service partner) can match workloads with the proper instances or service levels by assessing your cloud usage. Right-sizing is essential to cloud optimization because it impacts both performance and cost efficiency. However, it requires consistent monitoring to ensure cloud utilization does not exceed or fall far below previously established levels.
4. Spot instances
Cloud service providers sometimes offer “spot instances”—extra computing services offered at a discount over on-demand pricing. Spot instances can save money but are inconvenient because the provider can interrupt the resource if demand surges, and the resource can be reallocated with little or no notice, offering less autonomy.
Spot instances are best for non-critical workloads that can be interrupted without significant consequences. However, with advanced automation, even urgent workloads can utilize spot instances with minimal interruption.
5. Reserved instances
If spot instances are like a clearance rack, reserved instances are comparable to the savings enjoyed buying in bulk. By agreeing to a long-term commitment to use select services for one or more years, your organization can see up to 75% savings. Reserved instances work well for routine workloads that will stay relatively the same over time.
6. Eliminating or merging unused resources
Identifying and eliminating unused resources from your organization’s cloud environment is crucial to maintaining cost efficiency and maximizing performance. These resources might include idle instances, unused storage volumes, or expired system snapshots.
Monitoring tools and system audits can help identify areas to eliminate unnecessary workloads. Also, you can allocate idle resources where they are most needed by utilizing auto-scaling and load-balancing solutions.
7. Investing in security
Ensuring service availability is a vital component of an optimized cloud environment. Investing in next-gen security tools is necessary to keep your systems running smoothly. A data breach can cost an organization millions of dollars in litigation, malware ransoms, compliance fines, and reputational damage. Working with an experienced security partner can fortify your security perimeter, mitigate damage in the case of a successful attack, and help you navigate rapidly changing compliance regulations.
Choosing a cloud optimization partner
The simplest way to optimize your cloud or multi-cloud environment is to enlist the help of an experienced managed cloud services provider. CBTS has operated data centers and managed cloud projects for over thirty years. During a merger or acquisition, numerous priorities will come across your desk, making it hard to focus and easy to lose track of the big picture.
CBTS provides dedicated project managers to oversee your cloud modernization or optimization project. Get in touch to learn more.
