With this Quarterly Outlook we provided a deeper insight and understanding into 5(+1) ways to control your cloud IT costs. As we stated in the Problem Statement, the cloud can help reduce costs, but also introduce complexity. Having a hybrid IT model is already difficult to
maintain; having to maintain the costs within this hybrid IT model can be difficult. Not all ways to control cloud costs can be done simultaneously. Of course, having one of these 5(+1) ways implemented is good, compared to none, but having a strategy is imperative.
However, having a strategy alone is nothing without the employees in your business. Meaning, if your employees aren’t passionate about your IT vision, they won’t be enthusiastic about executing the plan, and then your strategy stands no chance. Your company will struggle to execute daily strategies, and implementing a new one would be doomed to fail. When changing (IT-)systems, the creation of visibility across the whole organization is needed. The multi disciplines of an organization (including IT and Finance) need to be connected with a clear strategy and implementation plan.
Looking at which cost control comes first, this all depends on where your organization stands and where it wants to go. What we do see, is that the following steps should be taken:
Alignment -> Alignment of IT resources with their cost can determine the profitability and allocation of cost per department or user. If an organization can’t identify IT resource costs before and after their use along with what or who is consuming those resources, the correct
entity may not be paying for ongoing support to keep the services available and maintained.
Governance -> The cloud and all its possibilities have a tremendous impact on governance. Governance needs to be implemented within every industry and shows challenges in adaptation and reorganization of the business itself and all its connected processes.
Platform -> Choose wisely… Cloud providers use many methods to prevent engineers from moving their workloads to other (cheaper) cloud providers. Once you choose a cloud platform and you use the native services of this cloud platform, you are relatively stuck.
Stopping the use of the cloud platform and changing it to another, requires a painful application refactoring, with an unreliable ROI at best.
Workload -> When migrating to the cloud think about what strategy for migration you are choosing for the specific resource. Stephan Orban in 2016 already written about 6 strategies for migrating applications to the cloud. This strategy is not only used for applications, but also for other resources.
