Focus On Cloud Spend and Agility For Best Results 

Cloud migration can open up a world of benefits to organizations, but the transition can come with complications that, if not thought through properly, can hinder the success of the migration and lead to costly reassessments. 

According to a study by 451 Research and published by NTT, the best way for organizations to have a successful migration is to focus on costs and maintain an agile development attitude.

“When assembling the case for a move to public cloud, organizations tend to overload stakeholder expectations and lose sight of the main imperatives behind the initiative, namely, supporting business agility and cost-efficiency,” said Chris DePerro, senior vice president of global professional services at NTT. “When a cloud strategy team has those chief objectives nailed down, they can plan supporting considerations – such as security, resiliency and scalability – around them more effectively.”

One of the best ways to  reduce total cloud spend is to analyze what parts of the IT system need to be migrated first, and what efficiencies or improvements this will bring. If an organization migrates the entire IT system, there may be issues with governance or compliance that may turn into costly endeavors further down the line. Organizations may find that some services need to remain on-premises for cost, security, or accessibility reasons. 

See also: Cloud Cybersecurity Requires a Dynamic Approach

“Common missteps are not taking time to understand and remediate as many issues as possible within the existing IT estate before migration occurs,” said DePerro. “It’s crucial that the best migration approaches are selected based on solid discovery for each workload.  This determines the approach best suited to an organization’s specific applications. Without a thorough pre-migration assessment of its IT estate, an organization might shift its existing inefficiencies into the cloud, where they become even more of a budgetary and performance burden by bumping up cloud’s operational costs.”

Being agile with the development and migration process can also lead to rewards further down the line, as changing market conditions or new innovations can force an organization to rework their entire migration to fit with new economic or customer values. 

“Agility is not always well understood, increasingly, it’s about using the cloud to give organizations the facility and flexibility to achieve their business objectives faster, rather than necessarily having numerous added features from the onset,” said DePerro. “We are seeing more and more customers trying to modernize in an incremental nature so as not to get bogged down in overly complicated transformation.”

The cloud can be this vast ocean of possibilities for organizations looking from the outside in, but that vastness can quickly lead to overspending and having tools and services that aren’t of value to the business or the customer. By optimizing the migration process to the areas of the business most at need of cloud services, organizations can reduce the overall cloud spend, while reaping the most rewards.