Tag: cloud economics

Using Cloud Flexibility to Drive Enterprise-Class Cost Efficiencies – A Tale from the Frontlines | Gaining Altitude in the Cloud

Myth

One of the current mantras that many enterprise cloud enthusiasts are chanting is that “it’s not about cost.” Cloud is all about business agility and flexibility with cost being an interesting side benefit, but not necessarily compelling on its own. Focusing on cost efficiency and TCO is indicative of a stodgy, legacy IT mindset that doesn’t understand the true paradigm shift of cloud.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, we’re finding that some of the more interesting cloud enterprise use cases these days involve leveraging cloud agility to aggressively reduce infrastructure and IT costs.

Take a recent client of ours, a Fortune 500 global energy company seeking to reduce corporate IT infrastructure costs. Its focus was on reducing costs across two primary datacenters that delivered HR, finance, accounting, operations and other applications to business operations across 30 countries. Understanding cloud options for migrating its SAP deployment was a central focus of their effort.

Facing an imminent and significant hardware upgrade cycle, it was more interested in exploring opportunities to reduce costs through traditional IT outsourcing (ITO) vehicles, as well as next generation, cloud-enabled delivery models. Critical objectives included:

  • Reducing asset ownership
  • “Variabilizing” its IT cost structure
  • Outsourcing commodity IT skills

Based on these requirements, our client evaluated potential solution options from nearly 20 service providers, including traditional enterprise IT service providers, cloud service providers (CSPs), offshore ITO vendors and telcos/carriers.

Our client narrowed the field to three potential solution providers, each with different recommendations on where to migrate existing applications and workloads (which were largely in dedicated and virtualized models). Recommended solutions varied not just across cloud delivery model (public vs. private), but also across asset ownership (on-prem private vs. hosted and virtual private):

Cloud Providers Solution Overview

And what did the client find? As shown below, leveraging a mix of virtual private and public cloud models offered the opportunity to reduce its annual infrastructure costs by over 30 percent!  “Provider A,” which suggested migrating approximately 30 percent of the clients’ workloads to public cloud environments ended up with the most compelling business case. While they recommended migrating 80 percent of the workload portfolio to cloud-enabled models, they did recommend keeping the client SAP instances in a traditional, dedicated model.

IT Infrastructure Annual Cost

Some additional observations:

  • Costs reflect all required migration and replatforming investments
  • Public cloud costs were indicative of current market pricing generally at the same unit price levels across the period. As shown by the recent AWS price drop of up to 37 percent on reserved instances, this is a very conservative assumption
  • Efficiencies do not reflect additional potential opportunities from active workload management

So where did the savings come from? Our client found that the savings were driven by four primary levers:

  • Consolidation and rationalization of underutilized servers
  • Migration of unpredictable and “spiky” workloads to public cloud models with consumption-based billing
  • Reduced IT operations and management costs
  • Defacto outsourcing of maintenance and support to CSPs

We’re seeing similar results across our other clients, who are finding that cloud-enabled delivery models, leveraged correctly, can drive substantial and lasting reduction in IT infrastructure costs.

Maybe cloud and cost efficiency aren’t so boring after all…

Economic Forecast Calls for More Clouds | Gaining Altitude in the Cloud

Have you ever stopped to think why cloud computing is at the center of any IT-related discussion? In our conversations with clients, from the boardroom to the line manager, cloud is sure to enter into the discussion. Today, many of those conversations are around understanding, and to a lesser degree, implementation. But once the discussion crosses the threshold of understanding, the topic immediately goes to, “How can I get into the cloud?”

Everest Group recently held a webinar on the economics of cloud computing. There were two objectives: 1) Help clarify just how disruptive, in a good way, cloud computing is and can be; and 2) Demonstrate the economic benefits that exist in the cloud economy, and that there are those striving for this competitive advantage today.

The Hole in the Water That You Throw Money Into

One of the key economic drivers that hampers today’s data center environment is the relatively low utilization rate across its resources. Think about it like this: You’ve probably heard the old adage that owning a boat is like having a hole in the water that you throw money into. That is because the majority of boats are seldom used. (Trust me, I know, I used to own one.) The per use cost of a $25,000 (and quickly depreciating) boat that you actually use three or four times a year is quite high, and the reality is you could have rented a boat often for a fraction of the cost. The same thing is happening in your data center. If your utilization is 20 percent, or even 30 percent, you have essentially wasted 70-80 percent of your spend. That is an expensive data center.

Workload Utilizations1

Cloud computing is like that little boat rental shop tucked away in a nice cove on your favorite lake. What if you could get rid of excess capacity, better manage resource peaks and valleys, and rent public capacity when you need it, and not pay for it when you don’t?

What if we leverage public cloud flexibility1

The Economics

As you can see in the graphic below, the economics related to cloud are dramatic, and the key lies in leveraging the public cloud to pay only for what you use, eliminating the issue of excess capacity.

Public cloud options unlock extraordinary enterprise economics

There is a variety of point examples in which this is done today, with the above economics reaped. For instance, Ticket Master leverages the public cloud for large events, loading an environment to the cloud, specifically sized for each given event. The specific event may only last several hours or days, and once complete, Ticket Master takes down the environment and loads the data in its dedicated systems.

There are also enterprises and suppliers working to enable peak bursting more seamlessly. For example, eBay recently showed where they are working with Rackspace and Microsoft Azure to enable hybrid cloud bursting, allowing eBay to reduce its steady state environment (think hole in the water) from 1,900 to 800 servers, saving it $1.1 million per month.

Hybrid economics example eBay

 The Steps to Getting Started

Dedicate yourself to getting rid of your boat (or should I say boat anchor?) Begin a portfolio assessment. Understand what you have, and what is driving utilization. Consolidate applications, offload non-critical usage to the valleys, and look for ways to leverage the public/private cloud. When I unloaded my boat, I freed up capital for the more important things in life, without sacrificing my enjoyment. Doing so in your data center will allow you to take on strategic initiatives that will make you even more competitive.

How can we engage?

Please let us know how we can help you on your journey.

Contact Us

"*" indicates required fields

Please review our Privacy Notice and check the box below to consent to the use of Personal Data that you provide.