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Should I Stay or Should I Go? A Cloudy Decision

Scott Leatherman
Virtana

If you've been operating in the cloud for some time now, chances are your business has changed since you first made that move and particularly during the current climate. Has your cloud usage grown considerably — and your OpEx costs? Is that just the cost of doing business in the cloud? It doesn't have to be. Here's how you can rationalize your infrastructure and determine if there are cloud expenses you can reclaim and even if it makes sense to move some of your cloud deployments into co-location.

The rush to the public cloud has now slowed as organizations realized that it is not a "one size fits all" solution. The main issue is the lack of deep visibility into the performance of applications provided by the host. Our own research has recently revealed that 32% of public cloud resources are currently under-utilized, and without proper direction and guidance, this will remain the case. What is needed is real-time data and intelligent recommendations to lower costs and assure performance.

The Need for AIOps

In order to optimize cloud resources, a third-party AIOps based resource is needed. This will provide an independent and granular view of how applications are using capacity and if it is right-sized. In addition, it will monitor the performance of the applications in real-time and provide metrics and analytics to eliminate bottlenecks. The allocated capacity can also be monitored to ensure an accurate match to workload requirements via real-time performance data.

Although the major hosts provide cost optimization tools, these are not very accurate. Analysis of billing and how it matches capacity over time as well as in real-time is what is needed for the cloud to remain a vital part in IT infrastructure. Armed with this information you can plan capacity purchases and discover wasted spend. By using a single platform for cloud management, you can monitor your infrastructure, plan capacity, and eliminate performance risks. Performance bottlenecks can be predicted before they affect clients and SLAs with multi-conditional alerting powered by advanced anomaly detection.

Cloud solutions are not only publicly provided by the likes of AWS and Azure. Co-location is also a strong option where your applications are managed on your behalf by a system integrator. This is increasingly becoming a stronger option for more business-critical applications. But to determine which is best for you, you need to start with the facts.

The "Cloud" promises IT organizations unprecedented value in the form of business agility, faster innovation, superior scalability and most importantly — cost savings. For many organizations, it is at the core of their IT digital transformation strategy. It is a disruptive force that requires application workload behavior knowledge, careful planning and collaboration from well-informed, trusted advisors.

2 Paths to the Cloud

As a first step, enterprises frequently target a subset of their less critical on-premises applications for migration to the public cloud. Typically, organizations will take one of two paths to the cloud.

A. Going cloud-native. Rewrite your application to use resources offered by a cloud provider.

B. Lift and shift. Very minimal or zero code changes to the application. Largely, just replicate the application in the cloud.

The faster time-to-production choice is to "lift and shift" the targeted applications to a Cloud Service Provider's Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). In the lift and shift option, the advantage is a reduction in the cost incurred in the physical infrastructure like hardware, floor space, cooling, security etc. and the management of that infrastructure. Savings will differ depending on your unique computing resource needs, workload refactoring and business models.

Answering the Key Questions

Even in its simplest form, IaaS migrations must be carefully planned requiring answers to some fundamental questions:

1. Will my application perform as expected in a public cloud? (Application Fitness)

2. How much will it cost to run my applications in a public cloud? (OpEx)

3. Which cloud service provider is the best choice for my applications? (Cost and Fit)

IT managers need answers to these questions before the actual migration is performed. As most internal IT organizations don't have deep cloud expertise, the question becomes who you can trust to provide you with the answers — to help you make better business decisions.

As technology and the cloud stands to play an ever-increasing role throughout organizations, ensuring that you're adopting the right type of infrastructure specifically for your business has never been more vital for continued success. Choosing a service that provides the answers to your key questions before the actual migration takes place and prepares you with vital insights into your applications and workloads targeted for cloud migration has to be an important part of the decision-making process.

As organizations continue to battle the COVID-19 storm, understanding the product that will overhaul your IT infrastructure, before you fully buy into it, is going to provide the confidence and assurance you need to make that decision a little less cloudy.

Scott Leatherman is CMO of Virtana

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Should I Stay or Should I Go? A Cloudy Decision

Scott Leatherman
Virtana

If you've been operating in the cloud for some time now, chances are your business has changed since you first made that move and particularly during the current climate. Has your cloud usage grown considerably — and your OpEx costs? Is that just the cost of doing business in the cloud? It doesn't have to be. Here's how you can rationalize your infrastructure and determine if there are cloud expenses you can reclaim and even if it makes sense to move some of your cloud deployments into co-location.

The rush to the public cloud has now slowed as organizations realized that it is not a "one size fits all" solution. The main issue is the lack of deep visibility into the performance of applications provided by the host. Our own research has recently revealed that 32% of public cloud resources are currently under-utilized, and without proper direction and guidance, this will remain the case. What is needed is real-time data and intelligent recommendations to lower costs and assure performance.

The Need for AIOps

In order to optimize cloud resources, a third-party AIOps based resource is needed. This will provide an independent and granular view of how applications are using capacity and if it is right-sized. In addition, it will monitor the performance of the applications in real-time and provide metrics and analytics to eliminate bottlenecks. The allocated capacity can also be monitored to ensure an accurate match to workload requirements via real-time performance data.

Although the major hosts provide cost optimization tools, these are not very accurate. Analysis of billing and how it matches capacity over time as well as in real-time is what is needed for the cloud to remain a vital part in IT infrastructure. Armed with this information you can plan capacity purchases and discover wasted spend. By using a single platform for cloud management, you can monitor your infrastructure, plan capacity, and eliminate performance risks. Performance bottlenecks can be predicted before they affect clients and SLAs with multi-conditional alerting powered by advanced anomaly detection.

Cloud solutions are not only publicly provided by the likes of AWS and Azure. Co-location is also a strong option where your applications are managed on your behalf by a system integrator. This is increasingly becoming a stronger option for more business-critical applications. But to determine which is best for you, you need to start with the facts.

The "Cloud" promises IT organizations unprecedented value in the form of business agility, faster innovation, superior scalability and most importantly — cost savings. For many organizations, it is at the core of their IT digital transformation strategy. It is a disruptive force that requires application workload behavior knowledge, careful planning and collaboration from well-informed, trusted advisors.

2 Paths to the Cloud

As a first step, enterprises frequently target a subset of their less critical on-premises applications for migration to the public cloud. Typically, organizations will take one of two paths to the cloud.

A. Going cloud-native. Rewrite your application to use resources offered by a cloud provider.

B. Lift and shift. Very minimal or zero code changes to the application. Largely, just replicate the application in the cloud.

The faster time-to-production choice is to "lift and shift" the targeted applications to a Cloud Service Provider's Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). In the lift and shift option, the advantage is a reduction in the cost incurred in the physical infrastructure like hardware, floor space, cooling, security etc. and the management of that infrastructure. Savings will differ depending on your unique computing resource needs, workload refactoring and business models.

Answering the Key Questions

Even in its simplest form, IaaS migrations must be carefully planned requiring answers to some fundamental questions:

1. Will my application perform as expected in a public cloud? (Application Fitness)

2. How much will it cost to run my applications in a public cloud? (OpEx)

3. Which cloud service provider is the best choice for my applications? (Cost and Fit)

IT managers need answers to these questions before the actual migration is performed. As most internal IT organizations don't have deep cloud expertise, the question becomes who you can trust to provide you with the answers — to help you make better business decisions.

As technology and the cloud stands to play an ever-increasing role throughout organizations, ensuring that you're adopting the right type of infrastructure specifically for your business has never been more vital for continued success. Choosing a service that provides the answers to your key questions before the actual migration takes place and prepares you with vital insights into your applications and workloads targeted for cloud migration has to be an important part of the decision-making process.

As organizations continue to battle the COVID-19 storm, understanding the product that will overhaul your IT infrastructure, before you fully buy into it, is going to provide the confidence and assurance you need to make that decision a little less cloudy.

Scott Leatherman is CMO of Virtana

Hot Topics

The Latest

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

An overwhelming majority of IT leaders (95%) believe the upcoming wave of AI-powered digital transformation is set to be the most impactful and intensive seen thus far, according to The Science of Productivity: AI, Adoption, And Employee Experience, a new report from Nexthink ...

Overall outage frequency and the general level of reported severity continue to decline, according to the Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute. However, cyber security incidents are on the rise and often have severe, lasting impacts ...