Today's IT world is governed by cloud technologies that play a prominent role in digital transformation, touching everyday life and enterprise businesses. To embrace this digital journey, companies must determine the most efficient way to allocate and maintain their cloud resources while saving costs. Further, they need to consider edge, networking, and AI/ ML alongside the cloud.
Getting all this value implies optimizing several vital areas, including management, cost, performance, and support. This is why cloud optimization is required. A process that, simply put, reduces overall spend by adequately managing data and cloud resources.
Why Businesses Must Acknowledge Cloud Optimization
For modern businesses, moving to the cloud means gaining access to the best enterprise-level products without the associated costs of managing and maintaining the underlying infrastructure. Whether an organization recently migrated to the cloud or has been running services there for a while now, they have likely realized how challenging it can be to understand precisely where their cloud spend goes and what drives their costs.
Organizations growing a culture of managing IT costs can quickly recognize areas of opportunity for cloud optimization. This initiative is essential for the efficient delivery of IT services, but organizations often struggle to keep momentum and end up in a repeated cost-cutting cycle. Then, instead of seeing cost savings expected by operating in the cloud, organizations may actually see costs accelerate. Companies taking this journey must learn how to forecast resource consumption and set budget expectations. They need to gain continuous visibility into what is spent for each project or application. Monitoring is critical, as costs can be decreased by detecting irregularities and driving corrective actions.
Cloud optimization continues to evolve due to new cloud provider capabilities, organizations increasing their cloud maturity, and cloud services becoming more complex. For instance, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provides over 100 different products over their platform. And cloud providers keep offering features that were not there just a year ago.
Even for tech-savvy businesses, it is overwhelming to keep up with modern cloud technologies. To unlock business value from the cloud, organizations must consider infrastructure, app modernization, data management and analytics, AI/ML, security, and more. Aligning these multiple cloud products and services to a specific organization's strategy is crucial and leads to new challenges. It is also unlikely that any individual staff member will possess this complete expertise to handle technology, management, or visibility. Their knowledge is more often general, lacking a deep understanding needed to solve real cloud optimization. At this point, cloud partners providing the proper cloud strategy is key to success.
