TALKING
business
‘‘
wWhat are the benefits of
a ‘cloud first’ strategy for
modern organisations?
There are many benefits of a cloud first
strategy. We are all aware of reduced IT
costs shifting the provision, management
and maintenance of infrastructure on to
Cloud Service Providers, as well as increased
agility, baked-in Business Continuity,
improved collaboration capabilities and
leveraging OpEx models, to name a few.
However, without checks and balances,
cloud costs can spiral out of control and
it’s easy to understand why, as most
organisations who adopt cloud first still
need to journey to their end goal, with
migration of legacy on-premise applications
needing careful planning.
As a result, these transitional hybrid
scenarios can create additional costs to an
organisation if not managed well or if the
company simply doesn’t have the insights
available to make good decisions.
Can you tell us more about some
of the challenges organisations are
facing when it comes to managing
cloud expenses?
With the three primary service providers of
AWS, Azure and GCP there is often confusion
during evaluation, with a variety of needs
being mapped into complex pricing models
making comparisons nearly impossible when
it comes to cost vs. service.
A couple of famous quotes spring to mind
with both ‘complexity is the enemy of
execution’ and of course ‘the mystery is
where the money is’ being equally apt.
We need to plan for different instance
types to meet the application and business
needs – general purpose, memory optimised,
compute optimised. Then we can throw
in the reserved instances or committed
use discounts, offering cost advantages
over on-demand services for longer term
commitments (crystal ball is optional).
It may be that the best approach is to
have instances with all three or even
more, but that leads to increased cloud
management and strenuous report
consolidation for transparency.
Glyn Yates, Regional Lead, IMEA, Matrix42
“
WITHOUT CHECKS
AND BALANCES,
CLOUD COSTS
CAN SPIRAL OUT
OF CONTROL.
Of course, we would still like the flexibility
of spinning up extra resources on-demand
when needed, for month end or for the
DevOps teams for example, but these
on-demand options generate unplanned
charges creating uncertainty when it comes
to budgeting or forecasting, so we should
calculate whether the extra cost of ondemand
would be higher than having more
reserved instances available in the first place.
In some studies it has been estimated that
organisations over commit their reserved
instances by around 30%, just in case, which
means 30% higher costs than needed.
What compliance requirements/
issues are organisations facing?
When considering compliance in the cloud,
we should look at it from two primary
standpoints – data and licensing.
www.intelligentcio.com
INTELLIGENTCIO
37