Choose Your Own Adventure: Moving Past the Complexity of Cloud

2019-01-09T16:05:39-05:00June 21st, 2017|ViON'S Solutions|

As the market becomes increasingly crowded with cloud providers and a range of models all claiming to be the best choice, consumers wrestle with their fair share of operational challenges. Moving applications, data and workloads to the Cloud while continuing to buy traditional IT infrastructure is not always an easy process.

For those already in the Cloud three realities have been revealed:

  1. Cloud isn’t always less expensive
  2. Cloud environments aren’t easy to transition into or easy to exit; and
  3. Cloud is more complex than initially anticipated

Organizations are grappling with the financial, technical and hosting and support considerations regarding the IT infrastructure upon which their data should reside—the Cloud or their current data center. Without a governance framework to address alternatives, launching into the Cloud can indeed increase your budget and delay the realization of benefits. Knowing how and when to use public, private, hybrid or community Cloud continues to confound even the most astute IT professionals. With so much riding on the outcome of these decisions, sometimes it can feel like being stuck on “go.” So, what’s the first step in shedding those doubts and creating a solid plan?

Get a Model that Provides Flexibility
If there’s one thing IT professionals have come to expect, it’s change. Today, the key decision isn’t what to buy but how to buy it. Choosing the right approach often means choosing one that gives the most flexibility to adjust and respond to your changing needs. Which workloads should and shouldn’t move to the cloud is an ongoing and passionate discussion for every organization. But moving from a CapEx to an OpEx model to accelerate transformation and leverage consumption-based capacity and cost reductions is something upon which everyone seems to agree.

This key decision about “how to” buy the IT Capacity required, is the single biggest decision within a IT Governance Framework that yields cost savings that can be redirected to application modernization (remediation, rationalization, cloud readiness) efforts in preparation for a potential move to the Cloud. Many organizations have begun using a consumption-based model that provides an on-premise, private cloud capability as a way of moving Traditional IT towards a cloud governance and operations model, focusing on efficiency and effectiveness of IT investments.

Increasingly, on-premise consumption-based models are becoming the preferred choice for organizations. Despite the benefits of public Cloud offers, the emergence of shadow IT enabled via the Cloud looms. Cloud spend for services that runs under the corporate radar is a problem when the keeper of the purse asks these common questions: “Why is our bill $500,000 per month? Who authorized this? What applications/programs are running here? Is this planned or ad hoc services?”

That’s why more and more organizations are utilizing on-premise private Cloud solutions to gain the benefits of Cloud and its OpEx model without the hassle of transforming applications and data and without the possibility of enabling shadow IT. In this model, organizations use a Service Provider Portal to control IT spend, track requirements, adjust compute resources, ensure on-time delivery of services and receive electronic billing statements – ultimately shifting their focus to business requirements and outcomes.

Cloud capabilities don’t have to be “off-premise” at a Service Provider—you can just as easily have cloud capabilities within your data center, providing greater flexibility.

Take Control
Your cloud provider should give you guidance on how to gain advantage in today’s multi-cloud environment, allowing for rapid IT modernization, streamlining deployment and managing migration services to optimize workloads. But most importantly, lean on your provider to show you efficient pricing models that you control. It’s a new paradigm, but one that can be tailored to your organization’s specific needs and help you answer those critical questions and be prepared for what’s next.

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