When the cloud won't save you money
A lot of emphasis is put on the cost-savings that cloud computing makes possible. And rightly so – 88% of organisations recently questioned by the Manchester Business School reported cost reductions as a direct result of adopting cloud services.
Cost savings have become synonymous with cloud computing, but it's important to keep expectations in check. Firstly, quick wins aren't on the cards for every organisation and there are a few common pitfalls that could easily add to your costs rather than reduce them. Second, it's a dangerous game regarding cost-savings as the sole purpose of implementing cloud services. Cloud services are there to help grow your business in a cost-efficient way – they're about the flexibility and scalability that on-premise IT simply can't provide.
A move to cloud services should be less about cost-saving, and more about value-adding. There are a few situations in which the cloud won't save you money but, sometimes, that's OK.
When you aren't ready to move
The anticipation of potential cost savings can sometimes be enough to tempt you into rushing your migration to cloud services before you're actually ready to make the move. DON'T - there are self-audit and discovery processes that cost-savings depend on.
Poor visibility before migration will almost certainly result in worse visibility after you migrate. Trial and proof of concepts are excellent ways to establish your readiness, and develop a well thought out migration strategy. For risk-free testing, make sure you use a non-critical function and migrate that first. This way, you can iron-out any potential issues with as little impact your business as possible.
When you don't move quickly enough
Conversely – and this tends to happen more often with larger organisations – you can quite easily get caught up in the planning of your migration for far longer than you need to. Dragging the process out by obsessing over every eventuality will just add complexity and cost.
Your best chance as a successful migration is to take a strategic and staggered approach. Don't move too much too soon, but rather see each function as its own small project. This tends to make the whole process much more manageable and easier to measure.
When you move the wrong things
Cloud technologies are evolving at a rapid pace. It's all too easy now to move all of your data and applications to super-fast, high-performance storage with a 99.99% SLA on uptime. But not all data in the business requires this kind of resource-intensive environment.
Moving non-critical, business-as-usual data into a high-performance environment will underutilise the hardware and generate significant and unnecessary costs. Be careful you don't overprescribe value to applications that simply don't need it.
When your goals aren't specific enough
The most effective way to measure and realise these short-term gains from cloud services is to frame the savings within specific business outcomes. There's no point attempting to allocate resources to a vague goal that you can't measure or report on - the time and cost spent rectifying that oversight will all diminish any projected savings. Make sure you set goals that are easy to transparently report on, and have a clear finish line.
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