There are many reasons for migrating to cloud. If the justification for your switch to cloud was cost savings, where do you find them? There’s a ““big bang” moment of cost savings from the transition to cloud. But it’s the ongoing expansion of cloud usage that leads to incremental savings that end up being even bigger.
Big Bang Savings from Cloud Usage
The big cost benefits of cloud tend to come in one fell swoop after a major cutover. In the biggest scenario, the business migrates all its IT infrastructure to cloud and powers down its data center. That saves on rent and power costs, as well as the cost of the on-site team. Even before the lights are turned out for good, cost savings accrue as the unused systems are shut down and remaining resources are consolidated.
Ongoing Incremental Savings from Cloud Usage
Smaller savings come as individual systems are migrated, or as ongoing growth triggers cloud usage on demand, rather than requiring large up-front purchases of storage and computing capacity. Businesses can experiment with new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, without committing large sums of money to what may be short-term technology needs.
Along with reduced expenditures on IT infrastructure come reduced expenditures on IT support. Besides shifting a large portion of maintenance to the cloud provider, the shift to cloud can simplify architectures and make them more uniform. This streamlines support, reduces errors, and reduces costs.
Some cost savings come from increased productivity. Because it takes much less time to deploy new technology, the business can start using it more quickly. Because cloud is available from anywhere, rollouts across the entire organization happen faster. Employees start working with systems rather than waiting. In addition, cloud’s built-in high availability means less downtime and less idle time for employees.
Risks to Cost Savings from Cloud Usage
The challenge for businesses is ensuring those incremental savings are ongoing. It’s very easy to lose control over resources in the cloud. There’s a self-service model, full of free trials. This can result in experiments that turn costly when they aren’t shut down cleanly. Depending on how the cloud provider measures usage, instances left online at the end of the business day can run up unneeded costs. The “lift and shift” approach to cloud migration, while fast, can result in sizing cloud resources to match the over-provisioned data center resources; it can also lead to a later, costly refactoring process that effectively means workloads are migrated twice.
Cost optimization services from VAST IT Services leverage CloudHealth and VASTView to provide businesses with insight into their cloud usage and cloud spending. Contact VAST IT Services to ensure cloud cost savings continue to accrue over time.
