Your cloud journey, what it’s costing you, and where to next?
As CFO, the cost of your company's technology infrastructure and systems will be an ongoing concern. Your cloud costs can vary significantly depending on how far along you are in your cloud journey.
Still on-premises?
If you carry the technical debt of ageing in-house hardware, systems and internal IT support - or are tied to a data centre (with the associated management and financial contracts), you’ll know exactly what it’s costing you to keep the lights on.
What is perhaps harder to place a dollar value on, though, are the opportunities you’re missing out. You can’t leverage new, predominantly cloud-reliant technologies like AI, or grow or scale with speed and flexibility.
There’s also the cost of risk, as on-prem requires diligence to back up data daily and remove it to a secure off-site premise to ensure business continuity.
The potential costs of remaining on-premises include renewing ageing hardware, lost opportunity costs, the difficulty of scaling quickly, and the cost and risk associated with on-site backups – all negatives that are quickly resolved by moving to the cloud.
In the cloud, but needing to optimise?
Around 2017, businesses rushed to adopt cloud services, and by 2022, nearly six out of 10 businesses had moved their work to the cloud.
However, few realised that the cost of uncontrolled cloud would result in unforeseen cost increases within a few short years. ‘70% of organisations experienced public cloud costs that were significantly higher than initially anticipated,’ reported The CFO in late 2023, making managing cloud costs a top priority for CFOs in 2024.
With the cloud inflation trend set to continue, it’s no surprise that ‘optimisation’ is the current catch-cry of CFOs worldwide.
In short – if you’re overwhelmed by growing cloud costs, optimisation is your first step to regain control. But does your IT team have the right information to know what’s important and what’s not, and do they understand ROI and TCO for their cloud responsibilities? Without a single pane of glass view of your cloud costs, it’s unlikely. From leveraging spot instances to using containerisation to moving to a hybrid model and repatriating your data storage to on-premises, you can – with your CTO and technology partner, bring your costs back in line.
Considering hybrid cloud?
The hybrid cloud model (combining cloud with on-premises) offers the best of both worlds and is the new and more affordable cloud strategy of choice for many.
Innovation, scalability and flexibility give you the best of the cloud, but core on-prem business applications can be retained rather than replaced, and expensive workloads can be run on-site. Interestingly, a recent Citrix poll found that 94% of their respondents have repatriated their cloud workloads to on-prem in the last year to control costs.
In short – with a right-sized hybrid approach, you can contain and optimise your costs and keep them predictable. Which is music to the ears of most, if not all, CFOs.
Reach out if you’d like to know more about optimising or reconfiguring your cloud environment to regain control of your costs or download our new Cloud Optimisation eBook
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