Achieving more with less: Leveraging cloud migration for cost optimisation

In the current economic climate, organisations have to pick and choose the IT programs that they can fund. Locally, we have seen the rise of interest rates have a sharp impact on business strategies, with many organisations undergoing program and structure changes.

Funding-constrained environments are often seen as limiting opportunities for change – when in reality, these times can be great forcing functions to deliver on what matters, make bolder commitments and get things done.

Of the eight key cloud migration drivers, the number one quoted and delivered outcome is “Cost Reduction”. In fact, a recent study revealed that managing cloud spend (82%) has overtaken security (79%) as the top challenge facing organisations. What’s more, a study of more than 1000 organisations revealed that organisations migrating infrastructure to AWS experienced up to a 47% reduction in total technology infrastructure costs.

Organisations looking to leverage the cloud as part of their IT toolkit can reduce their cost through the following three key areas.

Lower cost to operate

Cloud computing provides much more than “just another data centre”. It provides you tools, processes and services to allow you to greatly reduce your operational activity.

Freeing up this operational capacity within your team can become a 10x or 100x investment, as these key staff with fundamental organisational knowledge are no longer so flat out running the machine, that they have time to review and improve it.

Moving to AWS allows you to consume a mixture of “Infrastructure as a Service” solutions – such as EC2 or VMC – to host the bulk of your migrated workload, while starting the modernisation journey adopting higher level services such as:

  • Relational Database Service (RDS) – Provides fully managed database engines that look after the high availability, disaster recovery, backup and monitoring activities that your DBA team currently spends too long doing.
  • Managed AD – Provides a turn-key Microsoft Active Directory domain with automated support for server and database integration.
  • Elastic File System (EFS) – Provides an NFS compatible file system that has 11 9’s of durability, dynamic capacity and a cost model directly related to actual usage.

 

These are just three examples of “higher level services” that reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) for operating your IT systems.

In the current economic climate, getting the most productivity from your existing workforce has a huge impact on your organisation’s bottom line, freeing up the capacity of your existing team to focus on delivering value to customers.

Purchase on-demand

A core tenant of cloud computing is to provide services on demand. This ability to only pay for things when you are using them has two key benefits.

1 - Turn things off when they’re not needed

This fact alone can be the biggest cost saver in a cloud migration approach. All organisations running their own infrastructure have to constantly battle between having enough capacity available to meet the needs of customers and their internal teams, but not having too much that it is sitting around doing nothing.

By design, this means there is ALWAYS more around than needed. Sometimes this can be as much as 60% in additional services sitting idle.

In a recent customer of Cevo’s, we found that their production environment was provisioned to 2x their peak load to protect against growth. On deeper analysis, this peak load was only triggered three times a year, and therefore on average, the overage on just the production environment was 78%.

The dynamic nature of provisioning infrastructure when you need it accounts for a huge impact on customers’ bottom line.

And we haven’t even talked about turning off the non-production environments after hours or on weekends. Did you know that over 76% of the hours in a week are outside business hours? You turn off the lights when you leave the room at night and on weekends – why aren’t you doing that with your IT systems too?

2 - Enable rapid experimentation

Saving costs is not only about saving money – it’s also about saving time. The dynamic nature of cloud computing allows you to rapidly enable services to validate if they are right for your business.

The ability to provision a new database or a new caching tool in minutes allows your team the ability to innovate, without the delay in purchasing licences and setting up infrastructure in advance.

With today’s explosion of tools, you’ll likely have multiple options to solve the problem. And, since “time is money”, leveraging cloud computing allows you to quickly assess solutions, discarding the options that are not of value and arrive at a fit-for-purpose decision sooner.

 

Leveraging global investment

By utilising cloud computing, you are entering into a global marketplace where cloud vendors are constantly developing and pushing forward their products and services.

The rate of change through AWS alone is astonishing – with over 2000 new features released in 2022 alone – you get all of this innovation delivered directly to you, as part of the cost of consuming the service.

Along with functional improvements – it’s important to remember that AWS provides ongoing operational and security support as part of the list price. That means if you are using the higher-level platform features, not only are you getting functional innovation, but the AWS team is working 24×7 for you to ensure services are patched and secured against the rapidly changing security threat landscape. Partnering with a cloud provider saves you time and cost in operational patching a security threat management.

When was the last time your DC or hosting company made it easy for you to adopt new features and services by simply ticking a box, or rebooting a server? Or provide proactive maintenance to your systems when zero-day exploits are found?

The effort and innovation poured into the cloud computing platforms by AWS are a grossly overlooked cost benefit that any existing IT team would find impossible to keep up with.

How can Cevo help?

Whether you are an organisation with an established cloud footprint or still looking to take the first step, now is a great time to evaluate the current state of your non-cloud workloads and kick off a discovery activity to identify where there are opportunities for cost saving on both the infrastructure and operations level.

Cevo has a proven track record for navigating customers through the complexity of workload assessment and migration activities. No longer is it good enough to simply chuck a couple of servers into the cloud and get things working. Modern systems and solutions require careful review to understand the complexities and dependencies.

Cevo’s migration method has helped some of Australia’s largest and most complex financial services and retail businesses rapidly exploit cost reductions by leveraging our thousands of hours of experience, and hundreds of workload patterns.

Contact us today to get started on your cost saving journey through an AWS cloud migration.

Enjoyed this blog?

Share it with your network!

Move faster with confidence