Background

The Shift to the Cloud

We’re not in Kansas anymore

Many organizations have moved to deploy cloud technology, but they haven’t maximized the cloud’s value because their way of working hasn’t changed.

Enterprises traditionally procured infrastructure through large capital expenditures for data center hardware. After each expenditure, costs were relatively stable, predictable, and easy to understand until the next refresh.

Such large capital expenditures often irked CFOs, but executives and finance teams at least had visibility into the costs and could approve spending in advance.

The shift to the cloud heralded a sea change in the procurement and deployment of infrastructure resources. Massive differences in cloud vs. on-premises infrastructure have huge implications for how organizations operate, as seen in the chart on the right:

Organizations often overspend on the cloud because they ignore these crucial distinctions and continue to operate as if the cloud were an on-premises data center.

For example, HYCU’s Kim King, Senior Director of Product Marketing, says “one of the biggest culprits of cloud overspend is neglecting to terminate cloud instances when they are no longer needed.”

Stratascale Field CTO Jason Hood has other good advice about the developer’s sandbox:

“Be on the lookout for ‘sandbox costs’ too, which can happen when a business stands up new environments to support app development and then forgets to shut them down…. Take the opportunity to focus on how to shut down environments when not in use. Development, redundant application servers, and disaster recovery (DR) servers are all great candidates.”

If organizations continue to operate in the cloud like they did in the data center, they will at best leave money on the table, and at worst hemorrhage massive amounts of cash.