One of the questions I’m often asked is: “how easy is it to move to public cloud?” There’s only one answer: it depends. Unless we understand exactly what an organisation’s objectives are, and what systems and applications it has (and some organisations don’t know this themselves) it’s impossible to give a definite answer. There are too many variables and dependencies that can affect the end result.
After migrating your IT services to the Cloud, it is easy to assume that you are getting value for money. However, needs change and vendor offers are continually evolving. With the pressure on organisations to reduce expenditure, now is a good time to review your cloud implementation for opportunities to reduce costs.
One of the reasons more and more organisations are adopting cloud services of one flavour or another is that the costs can come out of operational expenditure in nice little monthly packages instead of giant wedges of capital expenditure. Cloud also has the benefit of scale, enabling us to obtain better protected and more reliable services faster than we can often build them on-premise for the equivalent cost. However, that doesn’t mean we need to pay the recommended retail price.
We’re all now familiar with the benefits of cloud computing: limitless capacity, almost total flexibility and increased efficiency, as well as transferring costs from Capex to Opex.
Most organisations moving services to cloud over the next few years will find themselves managing a hybrid solution - a mix of in-house, third party and public cloud services. This means they’ll need to find an integrated way to manage their cloud portfolio, because every supplier will claim ‘it’s not my fault” when a problem arises, and they could waste a good deal of time tracking down the culprit.
Have you been tempted by the falling costs of public cloud services? The big players are improving their offers all the time, and with some also setting up UK data centres to meet forthcoming GDPR requirements, server/instances of a few pounds per month can look like a very good deal. And for many organisations and many services, it is.
