Doing business in the cloud creates competitive advantages and cost-savings opportunities. Learn five success factors to deploy a cost-efficient cloud strategy.
If you’re not doing the majority of your business in the cloud, you’re likely missing competitive advantages and cost-savings opportunities. More than 93% of enterprises are using a multi-cloud strategy, while 87% have a hybrid approach combination on premises.
Spending on cloud services and infrastructure increased 34% last year and it’s not stopping. Digital migration and transformation continue to be at the top of most business agendas worldwide in 2021.
Five Success Factors for a Cost-Efficient Cloud Strategy
A well-designed cloud application framework is the key to deploying successful cloud solutions. When you have the right infrastructure, your business runs smoothly, whether you have employees working on premises, remotely, or in a hybrid situation.
We employ these five core principles as part of designing a cloud cost optimization framework.
- Define Operational Objectives
- Reliable and Redundant Systems
- Secure Cloud Storage
- Efficient Resource Management
- Cost Optimization Cloud Services
Define Operational Objectives
The first step in creating a robust, reliable infrastructure to manage your data, apps, and business needs is to define your operational objectives. The better you understand your needs, the better you can optimize your investment. For example, keeping nonsensitive data in a public cloud while reserving sensitive data and mission-critical applications for the private cloud can help keep costs down.
It takes a careful analysis of your business use-case to determine best practices for your organization.
Besides determining your needs, your cloud strategy should also include:
- System monitoring for performance and health
- Event handling
- Automating routine tasks
- Policies and procedures
Reliable and Redundant Systems
Downtime is not only a productivity killer, but there’s a financial cost as well. Gartner estimates that unplanned downtime costs an average of $5,600 per minute. That can range from $140,000 to more than half a million dollars per hour, depending on organizational size.
System monitoring, redundant systems, cloud connectivity, and automated backups are just the starting point for building a resilient IT architecture.
- Automated failover
- Business continuity
- Disaster recovery
- Redundant infrastructure
Secure Cloud Storage
When moving data to a cloud infrastructure, two-thirds of IT professionals say their most significant concern is security. A well-designed cloud application framework deploys best practices for security with a separate security layer.
- Military-grade encryption
- Identity and Access Management (IAM)
- Secure end-user devices
- Philosophy of least access
- Threat identification and mitigation
Your deployment should include a focus on employee education. 99% of cloud security failures happen on the customer end and not with the cloud provider, according to Gartner.
Efficient Resource Management
Just making the move to the cloud won’t solve your business problems. It takes a holistic approach to develop your infrastructure, applications, IT, and resources to create an optimal environment.
- Workload management
- Performance monitoring
- Scalable and flexible architecture
- Load balancing
Cost Optimization Cloud Services
Nobody wants to spend more than they need to get the results they’re after. One benefit of the cloud is that you pay for what you’re using now with the flexibility to add more capacity when necessary. Other cost optimization strategies include:
- Avoid overspending on unused capacity
- Private vs. public cloud
- Tracking usage, adoption, and cost anomalies
- Active management of software licenses
Rightsizing your computing services and optimizing them can be tricky. For example, there are more than 1.7 million possible combinations for cloud administrators when it comes to sizing instances.
Get Expert Help to Optimize Your Cloud Costs
If you don’t have the internal skills you need, the personnel to design your IT architecture, or the capacity to manage it, you’ll benefit from an expert set of eyes to help guide you.
When it’s time to figure out how to optimize cloud costs, experience can make a significant difference. Contact the technology enablement experts at Laminar for a free consultation to see how you can optimize your cloud costs while futureproofing your business systems.
Share this Article:
