Cloud maturity is increasing, but there are several challenges that can make it more difficult or expensive than it needs to be. The adoption pattern has also evolved, in part, due to the pandemic.
In the beginning, cloud migration was about storage, followed by applications and compute. With all the cloud services available now, businesses can achieve new levels of efficiency and take advantage of a growing set of capabilities, though cost remains front and center.
"Before COVID, we had to do all these pricing analyses to prove that cloud was going to be cheaper and we also talked about total cost of ownership," says Paul Borghese, VP of cloud and infrastructure at digital transformation consulting company Publicis Sapient. "Now it's about cost optimization. For a lot of our customers the low-hanging fruit has been moved to the cloud and now the biggest issue is expense."
Some of Publicis Sapient's customers are using ServiceNow or JIRA for automated billbacks based on a billing code. Once the request has been approved and the automatic landing zones have been created, the environment is automatically scripted with approved designs for security, storage and networking. Two benefits of billbacks are that IT's budget isn't being taxed unnecessarily by other parts of the business and when the user is finished, they simply click a button that deletes everything and ends the billing.
Ragu Rajaram, global cloud consulting leader at multinational professional services network EY, says while shifting to cloud-based services will reduce costs in the medium to long term, the initial migration process has huge initial costs associated with it.
"To save costs, many companies prefer to migrate on their own, which can cause inefficiencies and end up costing more in the long run. For instance, organizations may take workloads to the wrong environment or spend valuable time remediating skyrocketing consumption cost," says Rajaram in an email interview. "Each year, organizations spend more due to inefficiencies in cloud migration process and a substantial number of companies see their migrations delayed. This unanticipated cloud spend adds up globally in wasted spend. To avoid this waste, organizations should define clear KPIs to determine what they expect to save or spend after shifting to cloud. It helps determine whether migration is economically efficient or challenging."
