Cloud has enabled many organisations to adopt IT services much faster and with more flexibility than with traditional IT service engagements. However, a lack of planning and governance prior to jumping in can result in a cloud environment that is not as optimal as it could be. Through Tracer Cloud’s extensive experience designing, deploying and supporting secure multi-cloud platforms for organisations, we have a deep understanding of how costs can spiral out of control easily if adequate controls are not in place. This is why a cloud optimisation strategy is vital for both IT and business leaders.
Tracer Cloud helps by developing an optimal cloud environment making it simpler and faster to build a platform to address business requirements while ensuring consistent management and security. Our Cloud Cost Optimisation service aligns cloud optimisation strategies and financial goals.
With adequate governance processes, no matter how fast you move to cloud your services will be optimised and costs will be contained. The right controls should be flexible enough to adapt with your business as it changes.
The Tracer Cloud Cost Optimisation service provides the following:
Cloud Financial Management, Cloud Operations, Visibility and Compliance
Ongoing Cost Optimisation support for IT Operations and Finance
Promotion of financial awareness and accountability within IT Leadership and Engineering teams
Financial Reporting including budgets and actuals for the Leadership team
Once optimised, the opportunity cost of cloud will depend on the company use case – if you are developing a product or service an optimised cloud release cycle will deliver results in a significantly shorter timeframe compared with what can be achieved with traditional on-premises hardware.
In addition, cost controls combined with good planning, governance and automation will lead to cost efficiencies, operational efficiencies and a faster time to market. Infrastructure management will become predictable leaving teams more time to address any backlog, therefore benefiting the business, IT leaders and operational staff.
An optimised cloud can deliver the business a “fail fast” approach for new product development.
Tracer Cloud Cost Optimisation tools help drive cloud efficiency and cost ownership.
The benefits of the service include:
Capacity planning and right-sizing
Cloud-specific instance cost management
Regular reporting and predictable expense management
Project-based cost accounting
Avoiding common pitfalls
Organisations are quick to adopt cloud, but challenges include a sub-optimal environment without the best service control or security awareness in place.
A move to a DevOps model with integrated automation should be a priority for any organisation focused on product development. Service automation might not have been previously available (or very expensive) with on-premises infrastructure, but in the cloud, management tools are readily available and should be included in any optimisation strategy.
In order to optimise, organisations need to be able to manage services running on cloud, and most importantly, if they are not required, shut down and automatically brought back up again with a policy-based approach to service availability.
Policies ensure services are up and available when you need them, and only when you need them.
Keeping an eye on cloud costs
If you are migrating from in-house data centres, cloud can easily reduce infrastructure costs; however, for many organisations, the problem of “bill shock” with cloud remains a challenge. With proper governance and optimisation, costs will be predictable and remain under control.
Cost optimisation in the cloud depends on numerous factors – from data storage and retention, instance sizing to network data flow. It is also important to consider the type of data availability, backup and restoration options covered by the cloud service.
Managing cloud costs is different than that for on-premises infrastructure. Cloud allows the organisation to compartmentalise cost, track chargebacks to projects and other parts of the organisation, and to be able to categorise spend on a granular level. A detailed cloud tagging strategy is a must for any organisation to enable granular reporting and automation. Business units such as procurement, finance, business departments as well as technology should all have input to ensure sufficient tag coverage.
Cloud optimisation tip: Review your software licences
Make sure the licensing of any on-premises software is transferrable to the cloud and is correct for the type of service. The licences must be compatible, and the associated support must be suitable for the new cloud environment.
Steps to optimising cloud
Cloud optimisation should be business optimisation and help to support efficient business goals. Optimising your business processes in the cloud can free up resources to develop other areas of your business. This is one of the knock-on benefits of cloud optimisation.
Consult: Start by identifying problem areas and requirements, including service types and workloads. Identify what the business has and the requirements for production. Also, determine the service criticality.
Change: With the business requirements and rules covering those different requirements, make sure everyone is on board to work with the changes. Apply the rules and monitor the policies to ensure all workloads migrated to cloud are as optimal as they can be, and avoid “jumping in”.
Refine: Following any migration, it is important to optimise and refine cloud services continuously. This will help keep track of management, licensing and service costs. In time, applications can be refactored to use cloud-native services which can drive even more optimisation by removing the need to manage server infrastructure.
About Tracer Cloud
Tracer Cloud is an Australian-based cloud services company that helps leading public and private organisations to get the best out of their cloud journey. We provide clients with strategy and security advisory, technology design, migration execution and management of cloud services.
Start your journey with Tracer Cloud today.