The pandemic has paved the way for business organizations to rethink and restrategize the way they operated. The IDC report, Future of Operations Worldwide Survey, 2021: Technology Priorities for Operations Are Evolving has identified “cloud as the top investment priority over the next five years”. But equally important is to choose the right cloud architecture and optimize the existing use of cloud technology to make cloud adoption more fruitful from a commercial perspective.

The Flexera 2022 State of the Cloud Report says 59% of the respondents have identified optimizing the existing use of cloud as their prerogative. Thus optimizing the existing cloud technologies has been identified as the top cloud initiative by the majority of respondents.

So, what is cloud optimization?

Cloud optimization is all about diligent selection and allocation of the right resources to a workload or application to deliver business efficiency. Achieving business efficiency involves attaining an accurate and steady balance of performance, compliance and costs of a workload against the best-fit infrastructure. Organizations must reduce costs, boost productivity and move more business operations to the cloud as continual process.

The pandemic has taught businesses that embracing cloud technologies is the right move to stay future-fit. The International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Infrastructure Tracker: Buyer and Cloud Deployment Report “expects to see continued strong demand for Cloud infrastructure with spending surpassing non-cloud infrastructure spending in 2022.”  Hence companies must take cloud optimization measures to check the overall costs involved in cloud management. Businesses that use multi-cloud deployments must have multi-cloud management plans for optimal use of the technologies they have adopted. Cloud cost optimization right-sizes the resources you spend on features and services to eliminate resource waste.

Optimization strategies should be adopted in the below key related areas to get the true value from the Cloud adoption which enterprises cannot ignore.

  1. A penny not spent is a penny saved so we believe optimization starts from Day Zero. Invest sincere efforts in the solution architecting & resource sizing phase so that you do not end up paying for anything you don’t need on day one. Cloud brings you the power of scalability. Scaling out or Scaling-up may be a matter of seconds, if not minutes in a well-architected solution.
  2. Now that you have a well-architected and right-sized solution, continual monitoring of each active service from a performance and utilization standpoint is crucial so that you are better prepared to make well-informed decisions in terms of further investments. Never be shy to consider downsizing if that is the trend proven to be.
  3. Stay thirsty for news and updates since technology keeps on changing every second and change is good for many reasons. You may be able to consider replacing a legacy service with a modern and more capable service which could not only be in performance or operational benefits but also cost savings or even more revenue.
  4. As each day pass by, people and skills cost shall keep on increasing. While they are essential for the success of any Cloud project, identifying repeated tasks and looking at the possibility to automate the same is very important. It’s not just about cost optimization but about reducing the chances of human error and also ensuring your people do more creative and meaningful jobs.

To conclude, a Cloud adoption shall be the best strategy you make in this decade provided you study the business case in detail, build the most appropriate solution for your business case, size resources optimally and do the right planning for implementation and sustain the same using a robust support system. If you need a reliable and trusted companion to strategize your cloud migration, feel free to get in touch with our experts @: www.scaleios.com