Moving to the Cloud: What They Don t Tell You ARTICLE. Human Focused. Technology Solutions.

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1 Human Focused. Technology Solutions. Moving to the Cloud: What They Don t Tell You ARTICLE By Paul Rix, CEO at Zanaris, and Randall Singh, Partner Manager, Microsoft Practice at BCM One

2 We re all familiar with the promised benefits of cloud computing: cost-effectiveness, performance, security, resilience, scalability, etc. And indeed the cloud can deliver them all. But too often, once they ve moved to the cloud, organizations find three key challenges: Spend: Cost keeps spiraling and is difficult to forecast or manage. Optimization: Sustaining peak efficiency is difficult with ever-evolving business drivers. Automation: Day-to-day administration is a significant effort and demands new skills and tools. cloud assets to associated departments to manage chargebacks. How can you explain increasing cloud spend to your CFO when you don t understand it yourself? And how are you going to manage those costs when you don t know exactly what you re managing? How to take charge: Part of your due diligence in selecting a cloud provider should include understanding what information is available that will shed light on the details of your cloud spend. Find a partner who will make it easy to manage your cloud budget: Cloud Spend Management The reality: One of the biggest attractions of cloud computing is that you only pay for what you use. That s a huge cost benefit as you never have to pay for computing resources you don t use, like idle or under-utilized servers. You expect to see spikes and contractions based on the variability of business needs. But easy scalability another key benefit means that more applications and storage may move into the cloud even when the cloud isn t the best option. This cloud creep can result in constant cloud expansion without the contractions that you expected. This challenge is compounded when companies can t easily analyze their cloud costs and determine the financial efficiency of their cloud services. Several factors contribute to the problem. First, cloud services can be confusing. It s common for enterprises to lack clarity about exactly which services they need. Paying for unneeded options and foregoing ones that would benefit you can erode the benefits of the cloud. Second, many cloud service bills are vague, so you simply don t get the data you need to understand what s driving the spikes and dips in your costs. It also makes it near impossible to accurately allocate the cost of Find out what cloud analytics are available to you: You want to be able to determine exactly where your spend is going. Analytics will also help you understand usage patterns, and how usage changes over time, which will help you control cloud creep. Request a sample invoice: Cloud services invoices can often be vague and confusing. Ensure that if (or when) there s a spike in cost, the invoice gives you the data you need in a manner that s easy to read and comprehend to understand exactly where that expense is coming from. Ask for regular business reviews: Your provider should be willing to sit down with you quarterly or even monthly to review usage and spend, and help you get the most value from your cloud budget.

3 One of the biggest attractions of cloud computing is that you only pay for what you use.

4 Cloud Optimization The reality: Getting your computing workloads into the cloud is only the first step. You need to keep them running and to make sure they do so at peak efficiency. This requires not just ensuring application availability and performance, but also flexibly managing routine system administration, provisioning, and capacity allocation. And you also want to proactively optimize applications, workloads, and platforms to keep pace with evolving business needs. At the same time, your cloud provider is evolving its features and offerings. If you re always playing catch-up on both ends meeting your requirements and leveraging best deployment options you re not getting the most from your cloud investment. And of course, security continues to play a critical role at every level. The risks are widespread and the stakes are sky high. Proactive and comprehensive security management and governance must be an integral part of your ongoing cloud optimization efforts. Are you confident in your ability to effectively manage so many moving parts on a continual basis? How to take charge: How can you determine if your organization can go it alone, or if you need help supporting your ongoing cloud optimization needs? You think there may be waste in your cloud system, but you don t have the data or manpower to track it down. Your team is struggling with platform management, performance optimization, cost optimization, and capacity allocation on a day-to-day basis. You re not getting the application availability, performance, and security you require to meet your business needs. You re not getting the agility you expected when you moved to the cloud. Expenses are running much higher than expected. For many organizations, partnering is the right solution. But you need the right partner. Here are some things to consider as you evaluate your options: Are they tied to any specific vendors or are they platform- and solution-agnostic? Do they have expertise across the platforms, tools, and applications your organization uses? Do they have a defined delivery methodology? Can they demonstrate a needs-driven optimization and resource allocation approach? Are security and governance an integral part of operations or do they seem bolted on? How deep is their bench of technology experts? Daily Process and Deployment Management The reality: When you move to the cloud, you outsource your physical infrastructure, so it should require far fewer resources to manage things, right? Unfortunately, that s not always the case. You aren t maintaining hardware, but you still need to manage provisioning, deployment, and orchestration. That doesn t just require significant effort it also means a shift from an infrastructurecentric mindset to an application-centric approach. And this demands a different skill set. Hiring is not necessarily the answer. Even if you have the budget to increase headcount, the tech talent gap means there are simply not enough candidates to meet business hiring needs. Even if you can hire to meet your needs today, what

5 about tomorrow? If your ability to grow and expand is Automation requires highly skilled coders who are highly dependent on people, you could end up forfeiting proficient with the development tools used to write and one of the main benefits of the cloud: Scalability. maintain the automation code. But the good news is How does your team handle the day-to-day administration of your applications, let alone scale as the business requires? Do you feel like you re constantly re-inventing the wheel and can t seem to find repeatable and scalable approaches? Do you have enough of the right resources to get the job done? How to take charge: Leveraging technology for automation building repeatable processes that are faster, more efficient, and scalable frees up your people from day-today administration and tooling to focus on valueadd support for the organization. It also provides an increased level of agility to enable you to respond more quickly to evolving business requirements. Key areas for automation include: Storage provisioning Application deployment Application performance Security and operating system administration Capacity planning that, just as you outsourced hardware with your cloud deployment, you can also outsource process and performance automation. A partner will work with you to determine the best automation tools for your environment, create the necessary custom scripts, and handle day-to-day provisioning and deployment. Getting the Benefits You Were Promised There s no doubt that moving to the cloud can deliver very real benefits. As in most things in life, however, it s not quite as easy just moving your infrastructure to the cloud and calling it a day. But with a realistic view of life in the cloud, a little planning, and the right help, your organization can achieve the cost savings, performance, and scalability benefits you were looking for.

6 About BCM One Founded in New York City in 1992, businesses regard BCM One as their trusted technology solutions partner, integrating and supporting their critical business infrastructure and applications. BCM One has always taken a radically different approach than most firms providing technology solutions. Rather than sell you a list of products and services, we put our clients best interests first and partner with you to build custom, secure and cost-efficient solutions using our unmatched experience and industry expertise. We pride ourselves in not selling you a product portfolio, but rather we develop customized solutions for your business, which forges a true and even more valuable partnership. Through strategic partnerships with over 50 leading technology suppliers, plus our own solutions, BCM One recommends only the best technologies to develop a customized solution. We also operate our own Intelligent Network integrating multiple provider services into one seamless end to end solution, making BCM One a truly unique leader and advocate for our clients. For more information, contact us at: or info@bcmone.com. bcmone.com About Zanaris Zanaris believes anyone can achieve an optimally run environment with the right help. While many MSPs focus on either running hardware or moving software licenses, Zanaris believes in leveraging expert IT capabilities. At Zanaris, our innovative DevOps-as-a-service solutions connect the code that powers your business with the technology it runs on. We work with any app and any platform to design, migrate, port, configure, manage and improve your environments and applications. With North American-based DevOps support backed by SLAs, our team of experienced, scrappy, and creative DevOps engineers allow Zanaris to be agnostic and firmly on the side of providing exceptional service to our customers. Through custom scripting, advanced tooling and proprietary methodologies, Zanaris works with you to help you scale through technology, not people. Let us show you what your technology environment is really capable of. For more information, contact us at: ZANARIS ( ) or sales@zanaris.com.