Driving success through Cloud Optimisation

Re-imagine how.

Driving success through Cloud Optimisation | Introduction

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Cloud is the new normal. Latest research from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) reveals that the overall cloud adoption rate in the UK now stands at an overwhelming 88 per cent1. While public cloud opens the doors to a more agile, flexible, and scalable environment, it also brings with it complexity and the monumental task of tracking and managing your computing costs.

This large-scale cloud adoption is having a transformational effect across organisation business lines – from the IT department, through to operations, finance, legal and procurement.

Organisations are now facing the complexity of managing their cloud, as well as the continuous need to evolve their IT estates to meet changing customer demands and business priorities. The increased agility and velocity of cloud can often come at the expense of greater management complexity, and in many instances, reduced cost visibility.

Five steps to re-imagine your cloud infrastructure

40% overspend in public cloud

by 2020, for organisations without cost optimisation processes in place2

Driving success through Cloud Optimisation | Introduction

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Cloud is the key to an innovative, efficient business – but it has to be tended. Over time, organic growth risks making your cloud unwieldy and ineffective – and ultimately, a major cost centre for the business. While the ability to quickly and easily increase capacity is a powerful benefit, it must be managed to ensure spend on unused capacity doesn’t spiral out of control. This is a challenge highlighted in a recent Gartner report that stated that by 2020, organisations that lack cost optimisation processes will average 40% overspend in public cloud.

But companies can achieve a highly efficient IT estate if they take control of their cloud. Cloud Optimisation gives you the tools to control, manage and scale while maintaining control and visibility. The benefits are many and varied, from average monthly savings of 20-30%, to aligning cloud spend more closely with business needs3.

Cloud optimisation also helps improve governance and control, through cost allocation, benchmarking, and taming shadow IT.

Does your cloud give you what you need, and do you have the right tools to find out?This guide outlines the five key steps tooptimising your IT estate.

1 https://www.cloudindustryforum.org/content/uk-cloud-adoption-rate-reaches-88-finds-new-research-cloud-industry-forum2 https://www.gartner.com/doc/3859765/predicts--cloud-platform-expedited

3 https://www.cloudhealthtech.com/

20–30%average costs saved by cloud optimisation users every month3

Driving success through Cloud Optimisation | 5 steps

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Step 1. The first look

Step 2. Understand what you find

Step 3. Make a plan

Step 4. Implement change

Step 5. Cycle of change

Five steps to optimising your cloud

Driving success through Cloud Optimisation | Step 1

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To begin with, find out what you’re spending and when you are spending it. Does your cloud spend support your current and future business objectives, and are your workload and architecture fit for purpose?

To find out, carry out a high-level report detailing your IT estate, cloud costs, security and risk exposure. This will give you improved visibility and a single view of your cloud infrastructure, enabling you to maximise the information flow and enable decentralised and agile decision-making.

Collect as much data as possible from your estate and consolidate it for analysis. Use a cloud cost monitoring platform to highlight the key pain points and inefficiencies that are holding your cloud estate back, and map out the priorities for your optimisation process.

By taking a holistic view of your IT estate, you will be fully prepared for the next step.

Step 1: The first look

Driving success through Cloud Optimisation | Step 2

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Once you’ve decided your priorities, take a deeper dive into your cloud infrastructure. Make sure you understand each cloud feature that you pay for and how each application fits with your business objectives.

Monitor and benchmark the instances you have running to see whether they are fully utilised and when they are most often used, so that you can ensure they are always available when needed.

Next, find out whether your approach to managing reserved instances is fit for purpose, as well as getting a view as to whether any migrated legacy resources need to be refactored to become more efficient. Understand your general usage and utilisation landscape by performing a cost/benefit analysis – breaking down the services’ cost by feature, project and/or area of operation.

Having reviewed your applications and aligned them with your current business needs, as well as your long-term strategy, you can begin planning your next steps.

Step 2: Understand what you find

“Cost optimisation in the age of digital business means looking beyond IT and including business costs in the initiative.”

Barbara Gomolski, Managing VP at Gartner4

4 https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/cost-optimization-digital-business/

Driving success through Cloud Optimisation | Step 3

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Based on the insight gathered during the first two stages, you should now have a clear understanding of your cloud costs and where you could improve your systems for greater efficiency. Using that information, develop your application optimisation strategy, whether that’s remediation for your system components, re-architecting, repurposing or right-sizing.

Working with a strategic partner can help you achieve a comprehensive strategy that provides the advice and guidance you need to hone your insight into actions. Start with a detailed map of systems and services to plan how you are going to carry out the work. You’ll need to agree a regular reporting regime and review of usage policies, to make sure you can continuously monitor system performance and provide the ongoing insights needed.

You should also set a desired cost ceiling for your cloud’s ongoing opex by operation or project. For most companies, the ideal plan of action is to create a cloud environment that stays under this level, with the option to make changes if it breaches the threshold. However, for some applications that scale vertically, you will need to provision for your predicted peak usage level. The key is to work out what level of provisioning is required to meet your organisational needs and the most cost-effective way to achieve it before implementation.

Step 3: Make a plan

Driving success through Cloud Optimisation | Step 4

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Understanding your spend and monitoring your metrics are the first steps in the process, followed by taking action to make the adjustments. Determine the best practice policies you will enact, and then implement them across the organisation.

Driving accountability is essential for successful cloud transformation. This could be achieved by tagging, to tie costs to applications and resource owners; and establishing benchmarks to entice key stakeholders. Tagging creates metadata that shows the application owner and user what it is supposed to be doing, and its importance and criticality. The usage information could then be shared with individual application owners and business groups in a practice called ‘showback’, to encourage financial awareness.

To drive further the requirement of optimisation and cost optimisation responsibility, some organisations take additional steps by practising ‘chargeback’, so the lines of business are financially accountable for their spend. The challenge for many organisations, however, is collecting and conveying this wealth of information in a way that is meaningful and useful to the wider organisation.

Step 4: Implement change

Driving success through Cloud Optimisation | Step 4

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Building new systems can help improve cloud performance and efficiency. For example, the use of virtual servers during peak periods, such as the AmazonEC2 Reserved Instances, can be a potent cost-saver when compared to on-demand pricing, by providing capacity reservation with negotiated discounted rates.

Automation can be an efficiency booster as well, freeing up teams to focus on innovation instead. More tasks can be automated to reduce management complexity and minimise manual workflows.

It is crucial to monitor performance as you go, ensuring your updated systems are meeting policy thresholds. Reviewing your data handling processes and integrating systems will help to speed up the flow of your data.

Driving success through Cloud Optimisation | Step 5

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Cloud optimisation is not a one-off project; it must be a continual process. Your business strategies and priorities will inevitably evolve over time as will technology. Aligning your IT estate to meet these changes is key. You should reassess and redesign regularly, to keep the system running smoothly and to support your business goals. For many organisations, this process needs to start with the implementation of simple tools which can help them to truly benefit from the agility of the cloud.

Set up an agreed review process with your partner, to continuously optimise and advise on where you could get further efficiencies and cost savings as the system grows and changes. By continuously monitoring and updating your systems you can ensure efficiency is maintained, now and in the future.

Continue to repeat the process during the cloud environment’s full lifecycle to truly maximise the benefits of your cloud strategy.

Step 5: Cycle of change

Driving success through Cloud Optimisation | Step 5

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Partner for optimisation success

Your cloud is central to your business. Selecting a cloud optimisation partner, such as KCOM, enables you take full advantage of the cloud’s capabilities and innovation, while keeping your IT estate continuously optimised, with minimum disruption.

We simplify your IT by doing the heavy lifting so that you can free your teams up to focus on innovation and delivering business value. Our goal is to help you to achieve the full potential of your cloud environment.

Our expertise in both tooling and management enables KCOM to deliver industry-leading cloud optimisation consultancy. Supported by CloudHealth, the most trusted cloud management platform, we help organisations gain visibility into their cloud environments to give decision-makers a holistic view of their IT estate.

As an expert managed service provider, and an Amazon Web Services Managed Service Partner, we help customers turn insight into actionable priorities and ongoing best practices.

Get in touch: www.kcom.com/contact-us Call: 0800 138 3525Tweet: @KCOMbusinessLinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/kcom/

Re-imagine how.By combining ingenuity, agility and integrity, KCOM goes beyond the mandate: shaping solutions to meet the demands of emerging and future business challenges. KCOM believes that the greatest opportunities lie in the unknown. That there is always an alternative, smarter way to achieve business goals. To re-imagine how.

To start your optimisation journey, register for the free trial to help you gain visibility into your public and hybrid cloud deployments.

Start your free trial at: www.kcom.com/cloud-optimisation-trial.

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