Visibility and optimisation of cost
Phillip de Waal, Systems Engineering Manager at Nutanix
For local companies migrating to the cloud, affordability, integrated cloud management, enhanced security, and guaranteed service levels are critical benefits that justify embracing this environment. Globally, 81% of organisations are using two or more cloud providers to further solidify these advantages while avoiding vendor lock-in and benefitting from best-of-breed solutions.
But when it comes to a hybrid multi-cloud strategy, a balance must be found between flexibility, simplicity, and choice to gain the maximum benefit of the transition. In turn, companies can achieve improved visibility while optimising their costs.
Having a flexible hybrid multi-cloud solution empowers companies to capitalise on a platform that helps them unlock the strategic value relevant to the business. Along with this is having the ability to choose from flexible subscription-based consumption models giving them access to the resources they need, scaling up (or down) as required while eliminating costly waste. In effect, business and technology leaders can create the perfect cloud environment for their unique workloads while managing costs as effectively as possible.
The challenge when using multiple cloud service providers is that different interfaces, portals, tools, and security setups can create complexity. A unified management solution is therefore essential to support multiple use cases and overcome the vagaries of dealing with a different environment. By doing so and creating a simplified means of cloud engagement, companies can focus more on achieving their mission objectives and less about the minutiae of cloud management.
The third pillar driving balance is that of choice. By nature, using a hybrid multi-cloud approach means the company can choose between several service providers. The support and decision process around hardware, hypervisors, cloud, and license portability can significantly influence which providers are selected. But in that, companies can choose the ones that make the most business (and cost) sense for their immediate requirements while also catering for future growth and scalability.
Cloud cost management
Beyond these components, the associated costs to achieve cloud integration across multiple environments entail more than just the compute, storage, and network price tags. For instance, decision-makers need to consider leveraging vendor discounts to get the most out of their pricing schemes. An example of this is benefitting from discounts if the company were to buy and reserve server instances instead of consuming them on an on-demand basis. By effectively reserving space on the cloud, a business can save almost 70% on on-demand pricing. This makes sense for production workloads with a guaranteed need to capitalise on the cloud for extended periods.
Moreover, optimal cloud management requires continuous monitoring of the resources being used to avoid the risk of bill shock or feature creep at the end of the month. Fortunately, most cloud providers offer auto-scaling tools that help companies define the usage limits and policies for various resources. Furthermore, access to an automated scheduling policy can mitigate against the risk of ‘zombie resources’ left running in the cloud when they are not needed. An example of this is computing and storage instances running 24/7 in a development or test environment. These might not have to run overnight or on weekends. Turning off resources like these when no longer needed can significantly reduce cloud spending.
The cloud management platform
A cloud management platform (CMP) is a vital competitive advantage when it comes to gaining visibility of the environment while ensuring costs remain optimised. CMPs that control and orchestrate all assets from infrastructure to services using a single user interface can ensure workload migration between different cloud environments is taken care of without injecting further complexities into the process.
Fundamentally, CMPs can optimise cloud costs by eliminating unused resources, rightsizing underutilised resources, and automatically migrating to spot instances of capacity when required, amongst others. Throughout this, having access to real-time visibility and analytics is critical to ensure the organisation can manage its hybrid multi-cloud real estate.
As part of this, data and application optimisation across environments deliver a layer of granularity that ensures resources are used to their maximum benefit and that costs are kept in check. Take different storage classes as an example. Typically, these are priced differently, so having the capability to store objects in the most appropriate class can further help the company reduce costs.
Cloud governance becomes a vital component throughout this journey to a hybrid multi-cloud environment. The value of being able to perform automated integrity checks without compromising on application development while adhering to regulatory requirements around data sovereignty cannot be underestimated.
At its core, a CMP can help achieve governance by integrating policies, profiles, access controls, encryption, and other features without impacting the cloud environments’ operational performance.
True cloud visibility and cost optimisation do not have to be difficult to achieve. With the right CMP solution in place and an understanding how to benefit from multiple cloud providers, local organisations can unlock true cloud value that fits their unique requirements.