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In early 2010, moving technology infrastructure to the cloud, was one of the significant items in an enterprise’s innovation roadmap. Fast forward to 2020, and you no longer see migration to the cloud as just an innovative idea but a necessity for business survival.
Businesses of all sizes across every domain have moved their digital ecosystem (either partly, or completely) to a cloud environment.
By 2022, the global public cloud market size will reach a staggering USD 331.2 Billion from the USD 182.4 billion it was in 2018.
Today, nobody needs to sell the idea of cloud migration to any business as there are enough success stories available for businesses, to learn and be aware of its benefits. Now is the time to take the next step in Cloud where businesses need ideas and guidelines to optimize their cloud ecosystem for reduced operational costs. Moving to a cloud model already results in cost benefits but you can further improve the savings with a few tips.
Here are some:
Create a strategic roadmap
Cloud is an answer to many problems, but you need to be well aware of the depth of each problem before moving it to the cloud for a solution. Do not rush with your migration exercise. Check for prerequisites in your applications that may need a relook before cloud migration. A good example would be databases. Very often, your digital applications might be using, databases that need updated code or refactoring before being deployed on a cloud environment to handle workloads. By missing out on identifying this need, the migration exercise may work well initially but eventually result in poor performance, which can further delay business activities dependent on it. There may be a requirement to bring down the particular component of an application, redeploy it and map all dependent systems once again to improve performance issues. This effort would result in cost escalations and risks due to the activity taking place post business systems have gone live on the cloud. By preparing a roadmap for cloud migration, you can easily segregate components in your technology stack based on their prerequisites and reduce cloud migration costs. This way, you can ensure that you move the right component only when it is in the right state and at the right time to guarantee disruption-free business operations once deployed.
Read: How to Build a Rock-Solid Cloud Strategy
Keep a tab of environments
The ease with which the cloud offers the provisioning of environments for deployment can be a challenge sometimes. Developers tend to use several environments for different kinds of testing activities. More non-production environments can push up infrastructure costs on the cloud. To reduce cost buildup, developers can shift to simpler and continuous integration modes of deployment and use smart routing between applications to enable the parallel existence of logical environments near the production environments. This will help empower developers to test applications in “dark launch” mode within the production environment. This will reduce the need for multiple test environment provisioning from the cloud provider and ultimately bring down infrastructure costs.
Using the right kind of provisioning tools like terraform, cloud formation, or Azure Resource Manager, it’s possible to spin up (and down) new environments quickly. With monitoring and automation in place, one can gain flexibility and cost savings.
Leverage intelligent scaling
Most cloud providers allow autoscaling of environments to meet demand spikes from enterprise workloads, more can be done to improve scaling efficiency and reduce costs. By leveraging proactive scaling capability, enterprises can train their work environments to analyze past traffic and performance behavior of various components in the workload such as databases, memory, etc., predict future needs of scale and prepare the infrastructure for better utilization. This would help in optimizing infrastructure usage during workload fluctuations. Rather than having provision for extra environments all the time, in anticipation of increased workload, such an intelligent scaling mechanism allows organizations to utilize existing infrastructure in the cloud optimally and reduce running costs.
Build a diverse team of specialists
The cloud requires a slightly different team structure to succeed. The SRE and DevOps teams can work together with the development teams and not in a separate silo. This can lead to lower costs of operations, as it leads to more automation and clear insights into how infrastructure usage affects costs.
By 2020, nearly 83% of enterprise workloads will be on a cloud ecosystem. This could be public, private, or hybrid and vary by industry. But the bottom line is that more businesses are moving in the direction of a cloud-only mode from a cloud-first mode.
Increasing competition and disruptions in the market by events like the COVID-19 pandemic will put pressure on top management to optimize costs, which will include their IT budgets. Hence, businesses need to leverage the cost efficiencies they can bring about using the above tips to ensure best practices that they can sustain profitably.
