One of the biggest debates in cloud computing is whether migrating your organisation’s infrastructure to the cloud is more cost-effective than sticking with on-premises data centre servers.
The stick-in-the-muds point to ongoing SaaS licencing fees, fluctuating costs based on usage and the business disruption of managing a major migration project.
But the real answer is: “Yes, it is more cost-effective to move to the cloud – IF YOU DO IT RIGHT!”
It is the “getting it right” part that is tripping up so many people and can lead to hidden costs and effects that were never part of the plan.
Here at LA NET, we consistently make the point that the key to all successful cloud migration is in the PLANNING phase, and it starts with understanding where the opportunities for value add can be found.
Our checklist
Here’s our checklist for how to think about the cost-effectiveness of a successful cloud migration.
Visibility:
- Ensure you are aware of what your resources are costing the organisation. With cloud computing, hardware needs are the responsibility of the vendor, so you won’t need expensive in-house equipment.
- It is therefore important that you understand and monitor your current costs.
- Tagging can help identify resources, while you should understand your performance requirements and when your usage may dial up or down.
- Dashboards can help with visibility of resource usage as well as help identify under-used or orphaned resources, which can help with effective housekeeping.
Automation:
- Reducing human intervention in business processes can invariably lead to greater effectiveness and efficiencies, leading to improved cost optimisation.
- There are vast improvements to be made by using dynamic power control and scheduling, allowing resources to “sleep” when not in use and power up when required.
- Using automated management reporting to oversee and analyse your infrastructure leads to better decision making.
Scaling
- One of the biggest areas to see improvements in cost-effectiveness, whether automated or manual: scaling resources up or down when required, provides more horsepower when needed.
- Scaling servers in and out in a thoughtful and well-planned manner can also drive significant up-side, as the cloud enables instances to be removed or added in the right way.
Right sizing
- Too many organisations over provision their resources, predicting a heavily optimistic set of high usage requirements, which leads to inefficiency and cost.
- It comes back to effective planning of what is really required, based on all available data.
Licensing
- It is important to make the best use of licensing programmes, investigating bulk discounts and reservations which can provide significant savings.
- Microsoft’s licencing tariffs can be complicated for those who don’t know their way around and so it is vital to understand the best pricing routes and options.
Software company Flexera has commented that simply moving to the cloud doesn’t maximize cost savings — you have to act with purpose as almost 35% of cloud spend is wasted on average.
Here at LA NET, we are focused on helping you achieve the most from moving your infrastructure to the cloud.
We are a boutique consultancy and Microsoft Cloud Gold Partner with a wealth of experience managing global Microsoft Azure cloud implementations.
Contact us here to discover how LA NET can help you migrate to the cloud.
Recent Comments