Recent years have seen a shift in working environments for many businesses and this has often leveraged cloud for efficient remote and hybrid access. Cloud is allowing businesses to be flexible and to respond quickly to change. Now is the perfect time to talk about what the future may look like for cloud-based working environments.
Here are some key themes to keep in mind when making the move to cloud.
1: Cloud is a transition step to future proof your business
Nobody can predict exactly what the future might look like, but there’s one thing for sure – it will involve change in order to pioneer new ways of working and new business functions. Moving to cloud doesn’t need to be a giant leap with lots of risk and uncertainty. It can be a well-planned move that is right for your unique business requirements. Underpinning your business with a flexible cloud foundation means that you are prepared to respond quickly to your changing business needs.
It does involve a shift in mindset from one where a lot of focus is put on maintaining the IT architecture in-house, to one where the focus is on innovation. The existing systems are likely to have evolved over decades and may have acquired some redundancy, making them prime targets for optimization. Proactively planning and implementing the move to cloud is a perfect opportunity to address these.
2: It’s not what you spend; it’s how you spend it
When it comes to managing cloud costs, businesses might be driven by cost-saving measures that involve a combination of finding similar solutions for less cost and cutting the systems that are available. Each of these approaches has pros and cons.
You can shrink systems and reduce what is used and make do with fewer systems:
Pro: Less systems to manage
Con: Less options or suitable support to complete work
Or you can do the same for less by finding cheaper alternatives for what is used:
Pro: Still keep the same number of systems
Con: Cheaper systems can be slower or unsuitable for workloads
There is a third option though: by investing in cloud, not only is the business geared for future flexibility, but it may allow current offerings to become more efficient.
As a powerful example of this, a global on-demand streaming service who took the approach of investing in cloud storage, saw their spend in a six month period increase more dramatically than had it had ever done before in their core business. However, in that same time-period, they had reduced the cost to send a video stream to customers. With usage increasing and more people watching movies and TV shows, the tech now means that it costs less each time somebody streams a piece of content. Which in return means more revenue coming in.
3: Knowing how to navigate the customer journey drastically improves your chances of success
Businesses want to find more effective ways of managing their cloud estate and maximizing its potential. Many want to feel that they’re still in control and can continue to make decisions themselves. Whether those decisions are data driven, cost driven, efficiency driven or tech driven, there are three steps to success in the cloud journey:
Step 1 (visibility through tagging)
Tagging and labelling all cloud resources helps add granularity. It allows a much better and dynamic understanding of all costs and statuses in terms of knowing what’s being spent and where it’s being spent within your business. It gives much more transparency into cloud usage in near real-time, allowing better decision making and refinement. For example, tagging applications used by internal employees allows not only the high-ticket applications to be identified, but also surfaces applications that are used infrequently and are good candidates to be retired.
Step 2 (report the costs)
It’s important to get your accounts structure in place. Making sure your organizational units and accounts are set up (and ideally mimic your internal structure) means you can look at costs on an account level. This makes it a lot easier to examine data, as you can go into as much or as little detail as you want. Once you can see what’s going on, you can better see the true cost.
Step 3 (report the value)
Once you’ve got everything tagged and structured, you can start looking at whether you’re driving optimum value from your investment. Depending on how big your company is, or the complexity of your organizational structures, this can get complicated. What makes value reporting so important is avoiding simple mistakes, and making sure the right governance controls are put in place.
This is where increased automation comes in handy. Setting up a structure that responds automatically when certain criteria are reached, rather than waiting for the next review period or being overlooked entirely, helps keep people on the right track. Working closely with your cloud provider means you can set the level of automation and make it work for you.
4: Don’t be worried that small savings mean stalled progress – look beyond cost savings
When companies first move to the cloud, it can be easy to get swept away with large initial savings. And that’s because the easy stuff to cut gets cleaned up first. It’s similar with other asset management programs– for the first few months or even years, large savings can be made while things are cleaned up. Yet, cloud delivers so much more than cost savings alone. There is also great business value in the flexibility of cloud, enabling business to be dynamic and respond quickly to change.
5: Automation is set to go further
Many agree that automation to optimize the cloud experience, and spend, will play a much bigger role over the next few years. Hybrid environments that blend both on-premise and cloud will still continue to be important, but cloud is increasingly becoming the platform of choice.
To keep up and make sure it’s regulated properly, better governance models are going to have to be in place. And as companies mature and get used to cloud, they’ll get better at managing the complexity and the cost. They’ll have a much better understanding of the lower total cost of ownership and the benefits – and utilization of software – will be clearer to see for everyone.
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