All things Cloud

Did you jump onto the cloud bandwagon too quickly?

The global cloud computing market increased by 635% between 2010 and 2020 - a massive boom attributed to the growing number of SaaS, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers. Businesses worldwide couldn’t wait to embrace the cloud and all the shiny new things it promised.

However, as these things go, we didn’t know then what we know now. Worryingly for today’s CEOs, cloud compliance and security controls were in their infancy back then, and few businesses had the maturity or experience (or patience) to appreciate or anticipate the risks and compliance issues that would emerge. In short, the rush to adopt the cloud outpaced the efforts to secure it properly. 

Many deployed their (or their customers') cloud environment using Click-Ops (clickable options). This was an error-prone and time-consuming process that required whoever was setting up the new cloud infrastructure to click through a menu of computing options offered by a cloud provider (think of ordering your new custom-made Tesla, one part at a time, by clicking through hundreds, if not thousands, of options). The potential for costly Click-Ops mistakes was considerable in a long and complex set-up process.    

You’ll be glad to know that modern cloud migration has much more governance, control, predictability, and security baked into it as a best practice using DevOps. This approach uses codification - aka ‘everything as code’ or ‘infrastructure as code’ - to define, manage, and maintain requisite standards and governance rules in an ever-changing environment. So, for example, controls can be put in place to assure you and your Board that your data is always categorised and secured correctly and appropriately based on its sensitivity. Mitigating risk and ensuring compliance and security become hard-baked into your cloud environment. 

The other good news is that the controls you need can be retrofitted to your existing cloud deployment.

And all too frequently, this is precisely what we are asked to help our customers do. We start with a full 1-10 structured assessment of their environment’s maturity and identify areas of risk. From this point, we can prepare a plan to help them achieve their compliance goal (not everyone wants or needs to be a 10). 

Whether your existing cloud environment needs a compliance check-up, or you want to start off your new cloud on the right foot with the most robust controls in place from the outset, we’re happy to help. 

Your cloud journey, what it’s costing you, and where to next?

As CFO, the cost of your company's technology infrastructure and systems will be an ongoing concern. Your cloud costs can vary significantly depending on how far along you are in your cloud journey.

Still on-premises?

If you carry the technical debt of ageing in-house hardware, systems and internal IT support - or are tied to a data centre (with the associated management and financial contracts), you’ll know exactly what it’s costing you to keep the lights on.

What is perhaps harder to place a dollar value on, though, are the opportunities you’re missing out. You can’t leverage new, predominantly cloud-reliant technologies like AI, or grow or scale with speed and flexibility.
There’s also the cost of risk, as on-prem requires diligence to back up data daily and remove it to a secure off-site premise to ensure business continuity.
The potential costs of remaining on-premises include renewing ageing hardware, lost opportunity costs, the difficulty of scaling quickly, and the cost and risk associated with on-site backups – all negatives that are quickly resolved by moving to the cloud.

In the cloud, but needing to optimise?

Around 2017, businesses rushed to adopt cloud services, and by 2022, nearly six out of 10 businesses had moved their work to the cloud.

However, few realised that the cost of uncontrolled cloud would result in unforeseen cost increases within a few short years. ‘70% of organisations experienced public cloud costs that were significantly higher than initially anticipated,’ reported The CFO in late 2023, making managing cloud costs a top priority for CFOs in 2024.

With the cloud inflation trend set to continue, it’s no surprise that ‘optimisation’ is the current catch-cry of CFOs worldwide.

In short – if you’re overwhelmed by growing cloud costs, optimisation is your first step to regain control. But does your IT team have the right information to know what’s important and what’s not, and do they understand ROI and TCO for their cloud responsibilities? Without a single pane of glass view of your cloud costs, it’s unlikely. From leveraging spot instances to using containerisation to moving to a hybrid model and repatriating your data storage to on-premises, you can – with your CTO and technology partner, bring your costs back in line.

Considering hybrid cloud?

The hybrid cloud model (combining cloud with on-premises) offers the best of both worlds and is the new and more affordable cloud strategy of choice for many.

Innovation, scalability and flexibility give you the best of the cloud, but core on-prem business applications can be retained rather than replaced, and expensive workloads can be run on-site. Interestingly, a recent Citrix poll found that 94% of their respondents have repatriated their cloud workloads to on-prem in the last year to control costs.
In short – with a right-sized hybrid approach, you can contain and optimise your costs and keep them predictable. Which is music to the ears of most, if not all, CFOs.

Reach out if you’d like to know more about optimising or reconfiguring your cloud environment to regain control of your costs or download our new Cloud Optimisation eBook