If you already have full control of your on premise data centers, yet can’t stop under utilizing and overpaying for resources, then how can you expect to prevent these costs from rolling over in to your cloud strategy? The daily cloud hype is all around you, yet there are three pitfalls everyone should avoid. From cloud, hybrid cloud, to hybrid multicloud, you’re told this is the way to ensure a digital future for your business. These choices you’ve got to make don’t preclude the daily work of enhancing your customer’s experience and agile delivery of those applications.
Let’s take a journey, looking closely at what hybrid multicloud means for your business. Let’s examine the decisions being made when delivering applications and dealing with legacy applications. Likely these are some of the most important resources to your business.
This article highlights three pitfalls everyone should be aware of when transitioning into hybrid multicloud environments. It’s based on experiences from interactions with organizations working to conquer hybrid multicloud while delivering their solutions.
In part one, we covered the basic definitions to level the playing field. We outlined our views on hybrid cloud and multicloud, making sure to show the dividing lines between the two. This sets the stage for the first pitfall where we look at why cost is not always the obvious motivator for moving in to the cloud.
Not always the obvious motivator
When looking at hybrid or multicloud strategies for your business, don’t let cost become the obvious motivator. There are a few other aspects of any migration strategy that should be reviewed when putting your plan together. Often budget savings rules the conversations.
When giving this talk at three different conferences, we asked our audiences to participate by answering a live online questionnaire based on their company, customers or experiences in the field. When asked if cost was the driving factor in the decision to move towards hybrid or multicloud for their business, over 73% answered positively.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at how labor costs, overcapacity and overpaying for resources is often forgotten, ignored or falsely accounted for in cloud planning. They are good examples of points to consider when moving towards your hybrid or multicloud strategy.
Labor
Imagine a utility company making the strategic decision to move everything to the cloud within the next three years. They kick off enthusiastically as they have a huge cost savings, they think, but soon run into labor cost issues that threatened to blow up the budget.
One of the most overlooked aspects of moving into the cloud is the labor costs to migrate existing applications and data.
Forrester notes, “Labor costs can make up to 50% of public cloud migration, is it worth it?”
As Forrester notes, “customer-facing apps for systems of engagement…typically employ lots of new code rather than migrating existing code to cloud platforms.”
They decided to step back and analyze what’s essential to their customer success and move only that to the cloud. All existing non-essential applications are then evaluated and moved over time to commercial off the shelf solutions that require little labor cost.
Overcapacity
There’s an amazing bit of information should shock you to your core.
Business Insider revealed, to us that “More than 80% of in-house data centers have way more server capacity than is necessary.”
What exactly is ‘way more’ in this context?
A financial institution CTO presenting at Red Hat Summit talks about ordering hardware for their on premise data center, only to find out later that their usage numbers were in the single digits.
They are not alone, many companies have these types of problems. They don’t do routine checks to see how much capacity they are using such as checking electricity, cooling, licensing and other factors on a consistent basis.
Overpaying
Companies are paying an average of 36% more for cloud services than they actually need to, according to Business Insider.
Another trend around overpaying is that public cloud providers are enthusiastically supporting customers coming agnostically onto their cloud. As the customer leverages more and more of the cloud-native features of their specific cloud platform, a monetary threshold is reached and technical support drops off dramatically.
It’s a classic case of vendor lock-in, where the public cloud provider knows it’s cost prohibitive to migrate off their cloud.
Pitfalls everyone should avoid
In part three of this series, the second of three pitfalls is discussed. A pitfall that everyone should avoid with hybrid multicloud. Find out why care should be taken with moving everything into the cloud.
| Published on Java Code Geeks with permission by Eric Schabell, partner at our JCG program. See the original article here: 3 Pitfalls Everyone Should Avoid with Hybrid Multicloud (Part 2) Opinions expressed by Java Code Geeks contributors are their own. |
