As businesses look to optimise their costs to weather economic downturns , ramping up cloud spend can cause some headaches . While there are lots of different options to help mitigate this , from moving workloads to a more cost-effective environment , or even back to on-premises or rearchitecting to save costs , organisations often lack the technical agility to make the most of them .

With modern businesses carrying so much data , some legacy or homegrown applications not allowing for transfer and cloud lock-in all to contend with , it can feel like trying to fit a thousand square pegs through a thousand round holes .

All of this is against the backdrop of cyber threats like ransomware , so the right balance between cost and security needs to be found for every workload . To avoid this , IT teams are increasingly designing and adjusting their environments with portability in mind , but there are some questions to ask yourself first .

Data hygiene double-edged sword . While the attractiveness of the cloud is that you only pay for what you need , the other side is there is no spending cap so costs can easily get out of control .

To solve this , better data hygiene can help , but for the data you do need , it is about picking the right platform for the workload . This may involve re-platforming or re-architecting to optimise costs . This is where data governance and hygiene come in – before looking to move data or improve processes , you need to know exactly what data you have , and where .

Rick Vanover , Senior Director Product Strategy , Veeam

To say the obvious for a second , modern enterprise IT environments are vastly complex . They can be monolithic and highly dispersed , with the growing data gravity of some environments making many companies essentially digital hoarders . This is problematic as is , as holding on to data you do not need exposes you to unnecessary cybersecurity and compliance risks .

So , once you have set up what data you should think about moving , either to a different environment , server , or storage tier , the next , more difficult question is what data you can move . Unfortunately , this is where many organisations face challenges .

Technical debt , cloud lock-in

But data bloat in the cloud also brings severe financial consequences and the dreaded bill shock when that invoice lands .

So , even though many companies moved to the cloud in the first place to optimise costs , the flexibility that the cloud gives businesses can be something of a

Essentially the extra work and maintenance needed to update older or scratch-built applications to get them to a point where they are transferable and compatible with other environments . The cause of these issues might be taking shortcuts , making mistakes , or simply not following standard procedures during software development . But leaving it unfixed makes it impossible

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Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 102 | Page 73

WHILE MANY COMPANIES MOVED TO THE CLOUD IN THE FIRST PLACE TO OPTIMISE COSTS , THE FLEXIBILITY THAT THE CLOUD GIVES BUSINESSES CAN BE A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD .

WHILE MANY COMPANIES MOVED TO THE CLOUD IN THE FIRST PLACE TO OPTIMISE COSTS , THE FLEXIBILITY THAT THE CLOUD GIVES BUSINESSES CAN BE A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD .