5 min read
No matter what your motivation was at the time, moving to the public cloud should never really have been about saving money. The real benefits of the cloud lie in the flexibility, scalability, and agility you gain from letting a hyperscaler manage your enterprise infrastructure.
Unfortunately, as a tech sector already suffering a downturn faces an economic slowdown (some might say “recession”), the time has come to focus on optimizing costs everywhere. And with more and more of your infrastructure in the cloud, that includes the growing cost of your public cloud investment.
So, ask yourself this simple question: What are your true costs in the cloud? And then ask, more importantly, whether you understand the true business value of those costs?
Do you know whether your applications would deliver more business value if they were rearchitected to be cloud-native, meaning they use cloud resources far more efficiently?
These questions, and more like them, can be answered with the right cloud FinOps framework. An effective FinOps framework should expand on the FinOps Foundation’s own model by including application modernization, helping you understand the business value of your application portfolio running in the cloud.
For example, while taking a “lift and shift” approach — moving your data wholesale from an on-premises data center into a public cloud — is popular for cloud migrations because it is the quickest and easiest way to get started, there can be a sting in the tail.
Everything may seem fine at first, but once the bills start arriving, that initial cost could be a shock. One analyst estimates that cloud costs can run two to three times more than expected. And the usual response to a cost crisis is to implement basic, operational cost-optimization practices, like "right-sizing" and "auto-shutdown." The problem is that this operational approach of cost-optimization rarely considers the business value delivered by the spend in the cloud. Simple cost-optimization techniques could actually slow or even curb true business value.
Instead of the initial lift-and-shift, creating an inventory of the data and applications being migrated, prioritizing how to migrate them, and then performing an initial app rationalization to determine which should be refactored to cloud-native first could have contributed to a much smarter forward strategy. This could have visibly offset the cloud spend against its benefits, and prevented the panic crisis approach.
This is just one example of where a mature, traditional cloud FinOps practice shines — illuminating numerous cost-optimization opportunities and measuring them against the business value.
People power
Business decisions like these about cloud in your business are best made by the most cloud-aware people in your organization, whether they manage a line of business or a software product. FinOps places value decisions in the hands of the people who know where to find the best business value.
If it sounds like we’re saying that you don't need technology experts anymore, it’s actually the complete opposite. With all this focus on cost optimization, and ensuring the business value of your existing applications running in the cloud, most enterprises forget the reasons they went into the public cloud in the first place:
Flexibility |
Scalability |
Agility |
In other words, you can get so focused on managing costs, that you forget about positioning your enterprise for growth and adaptation. The cloud was always less about technology as much as it has always been about making your enterprise — all of it — more agile, and more competitive.
There's an old saying: When the tide recedes and you are up to your neck in alligators, it's hard to remember that your initial objective was to cross the swamp.
As you prepare to cross that “recession swamp,” don't get so caught up in negotiating the “cost alligators” that you forget the true value of making it across. Make sure your FinOps practice includes a process for continually rationalizing your application portfolio and refactoring what will provide the most benefit during this economic ebb.
Whether the recession ends soon, or into next year or beyond, you need to make sure your enterprise will be ready with a mature FinOps practice to focus on the true business value of operating in the cloud.
Our SoftServe FinOps Framework can help you position your enterprise to cross the swamp while keeping the ‘gators at bay — optimizing cloud spend while maintaining the original business outcomes cloud can deliver.