Your hybrid cloud investment could end up costing you more money than your legacy infrastructure. This is a fact that has hit many companies hard. The promises of scale, reduced costs and flexibility can be swept aside by poorly integrated systems, limited insight into usage, and bad planning. Here are five steps you can take to manage your move to the hybrid cloud so you don’t get hit by unexpected costs and poor results.
01: Plan, plan, and plan again
Perhaps the single biggest mistake made by companies moving from on-prem to hybrid is a lack of planning. This is what usually causes the arrival of an unpleasantly large bill at the end of the month, and this can come with the double sting of poor performance because systems haven’t been correctly optimised. Considering that cost saving is the single biggest benefit to a hybrid cloud investment, it makes sense to plan down to the finest detail to ensure that your shift in IT spend is optimised.
02: Keep a close eye on your usage
The best part of cloud is the ability to spin up environments at will, to scale-out infrastructure on demand. But the instance spun up to resolve a specific issue can be forgotten, or left running when its scale is no longer relevant, steadily adding to the bill all the while. To overcome this challenge, you need to ensure that users are fully aware of the cost implications of cloud as it is not always cheaper.
03: Identify the right resources
As part of your planning, you will have identified the systems and spaces that cloud needs to fill, but you equally need to establish exactly what resources your business needs and how to optimise their usage. Cloud works perfectly if it knows precisely how it is being used. So, ensure that you have a clear view of your cloud assets so they are being used correctly. This will allow you to identify which areas of the business use cloud more intensively and to optimise their spend and usage to fit expectations.
04: Get the right partner
All too often the bill at the end of the month is as mystifying as the high price tag. Spend is difficult to identify, areas of high cost hard to find and the overall sense of frustration is high. If you start out down your hybrid cloud road with a reliable partner, you can bypass these challenges before they start. Part of your planning process should be to engage with a trusted partner that can help you select the right cloud tools for your business, ensure that these are optimised for your budget, and help you cement accountability across the organisation. ETZ Global has been working with companies from around the world to help them transform their hybrid cloud investments and get optimal results. We understand cloud, we know hybrid, and we respect your budgets.
05: Keep it tight
This is another area where ETZ Global can help you refine your hybrid cloud investment, by preventing you from making a very common mistake – adding providers at will. This does more than add functionality, it adds costs and complexity. With multiple providers, you’re juggling multiple solutions and services and platforms and costs. Cut the clutter with a single partner that has the ability to give you the scope and scale you need across multiple technologies and platforms.
