Planning is the key to cloud success

Although most organisations (80%) recognise cloud computing as being vital to their financial security, more than half (57%) have encountered unexpected costs. These findings come from part three of the four-part Cloud Impact Study from Aptum, the global hybrid multi-cloud managed service provider. The report, titled A Bright Forecast on Cloud, explores the financial benefits of cloud computing and how organizations can optimise cloud spend.

According to the report findings, most IT professionals (80%) see success in utilising cloud services to unlock greater business profitability. The agility of cloud deployments allows organisations to quickly scale their services to support demand, release new products or services to market, and subsequently improve profit margins and increase efficiencies. In fact, increased efficiency is a common driver behind cloud computing for 72% of respondents. The overall efficiency and flexibility of cloud allows organisations to only pay for what they use, increasing overall profitability, which is cited by 39% of respondents as a motivator behind cloud adoption.

However, as organisations migrate workloads to different cloud platforms, visibility and control into cloud environments becomes difficult to achieve, often leading to unforeseen costs – a key challenge for 81% of respondents. Without necessary insights to evaluate performance and enforce remedial measures for issues, the efficiency of cloud becomes hard to manage. This is the case for over half of respondents (57%) who say cloud has resulted in unanticipated costs, and over a third of respondents (35%) who admit they are wasting IT spend due to the inefficient use of cloud platforms. 

“The greater operational efficiency and flexibility that cloud promises can grant organisations opportunities to unlock new performance capabilities and help cut costs,” Leigh Plumley, Chief Revenue Officer at Aptum, explains. “But most businesses don’t have the in-house expertise to effectively specialise and manage a range of environments and stay current with the rate of change in technologies.”

Plumley continues: “A cloud partner can help organisations harness the power of cloud to deliver greater efficiencies. Partners like Aptum will provide a holistic approach encompassing best-practice architecture, security, resilience and cloud-connectivity. For businesses to understand the true total cost of ownership and deliver maximum value from their cloud investments, it’s essential to consider all these components of cloud architectures.”

“Organisations increasingly find that the journey to cloud is not always a straight path. Cloud adoption comes with a learning curve and it is often difficult to address these challenges with existing internal IT resources,” states Philbert Shih, Managing Director at Structure Research. “This has created healthy demand for MSPs and infrastructure service providers to help manage and optimise cloud usage on behalf of mid-tier and large enterprise organisations. Service providers have established economies of expertise through repeated trials and operational scale. And they are able to package all this know-how into a consumable service that end users can benefit from on day one.” 

The data suggests that cloud deployments without expert guidance from a Managed Service Partner (MSP) can increase associated costs if cloud optimisation is not a fundamental principle from the start. Taking a holistic approach to cloud infrastructures, where visibility and control are embedded from design, can ensure costs are optimised and the service runs at maximum efficiency.