Taos recently hosted one of its ongoing webinars to bring unique, industry-leading perspectives to some of the major challenges organizations are facing in their transitions to the cloud. In this latest session, Chris Huntley, Associate Partner Solutions at Taos, Donald Lutz, and Shadoe DiStefano, Consultant- Cloud Architect at Taos, sat down to discuss how businesses could find untapped value in their cloud spending.
During the course of the webinar, these experts tackled how to approach cloud optimization while working with different Cloud Service Providers, a value vs. Savings-based strategy, and what a well-architected solution could look like depending on a specific organization’s operational priorities.
A point was made that cloud is always easy to consume, but spend is difficult to predict much less control. According to Taos’ own research, at least 30% of cloud-based resources are wasted due to under-utilization and lack of visibility. Even worse, Taos has observed that at least 60% of scalable resources are not optimized for most businesses.
How can companies control costs, save money, and drive higher efficiency?
The biggest challenges involving cloud spend include:
- Complex and multi-faceted pricing
- Ease of cloud service provisioning
- The extreme granularity of bills
- The constant change in cloud offerings
- Excess of alternative architectures
- Lack of standardization between cloud platforms
Focusing on making a positive difference
Ultimately, it’s a matter of optimization and efficiency. There will always be spend that must be handled, but how can an organization make the most of it? Cloud spend should provide an ROI. It should benefit the business and help it grow, otherwise, it’s more wasted time and energy. The webinar boiled down to a strategic approach that involved:
- Governance – A business must determine what to do with the cloud-based resources it has as well as its available budget, in line with growth priorities.
- Audit – Throughout cloud usage, IT admins and management must be able to see what’s happening within all cloud environments.
- Action – A business must have the ability to respond to usage fluctuations and varying needs, and adjust cloud availability and resourcing accordingly.
In applying this strategy, the webinar leaders focused on a 5 pillars transformation model based on:
| Cost | Security |
Performance
|
Operational
Excellence
|
Reliability
|
These pillars can’t just be dealt with at random, either. They must be prioritized and balanced to be as optimal as possible. Throughout the process, there are three key areas that must constantly be assessed in order to optimize cloud usage and spend:
- Over-provisioning and efficiency
- Automation gaps and potential
- Total cloud spend commitment for savings
Once a business achieves cloud cost stability, then it can settle on an optimal spending commitment for a cloud provider. All providers—such as AWS, Azure, and GCP—have different spend commitments, but approach them differently.
In an excellent summary, Chris Huntley stated, “Everything has to come down to what the business gets out of it… If we’re not driving the business forward, is it really, truly a value-based equation?”
Watch On-Demand Webinar: https://www.taos.com/resources/the-cloud-cost-advisory-how-to-get-the-most-value/