Efficiency – both in terms of performance and cost – is every organisation’s goal. However, performance and cost are sometimes at odds with one another. Every business wants to save money while not compromising on service – the age-old drive to do more with less. This is especially true when it comes to cloud.
For organisations using the cloud, either to deliver a service or at an operational level, top performance of cloud services means having the right capacity to deliver them. But top performance doesn’t equal spending more money. Rather, there is a balance between performance and cost (as well as reliability and stability, but we’ll get to that later).
This balance is cloud cost optimisation.
The drive to save money has been exacerbated over the last few years thanks to an unpredictable economic climate. Coupled with rising cloud costs and increased demand for adopting new technologies and there is a perfect storm for cloud cost optimisation.
In addition, cloud’s raison d’etre is to be cost effective, stable and deliver high levels of performance. When one or all three of these things isn’t happening, something needs to change.
Why should you consider cloud cost optimisation?
- Your cloud costs are spiralling out of control
- Your cloud costs are growing faster than your business is
- Your profit margins are being eroded
- Predicting future cloud cost is becoming a problem
- Cloud costs are drawing investment away from investing in new technologies or away from product delivery teams
The ins and outs of cost optimisation
So, what is cloud cost optimisation? Isn’t it just right sizing?
No. At Capacitas, we believe cloud cost optimisation is the key to building a cost-efficient organisation – not just a way to gain immediate cost savings, but a longer-term, more thoughtful approach that promotes an organisation-wide culture of cost-efficiency.
We know that managing cloud costs isn’t always easy – in fact it’s often more complex than you anticipate. While it does involve finding excess capacity, there is more to it than that. It’s not enough just to identify areas that are being over-provisioned. You need to understand the reason behind that excess capacity. For example, it may mean that the cloud service isn’t performing as it should be or the engineering teams behind it don’t have the confidence in it. In the latter example, excess capacity is seen as a safety blanket.
From there, it’s building out an approach that looks at the bigger cloud usage picture – using past data to predict future usage and better understand how you’re currently using cloud. We use a seven-principle model to help our clients build a cost-efficient organisation, discussed in detail in this blog on our website.
The value of cloud cost optimisation
The ultimate goal of cloud cost optimisation – rapidly and sustainably reducing cloud spend, while maximising performance and scalability. In a nutshell, there are five elements you need to balance when looking at cloud cost optimisation:
Having the right resource in the right place at the right time, at the right price and delivering the right value to the business.
When you have that balance, your business will benefit in a number of ways – starting with improved service reliability which helps to minimise incidents that cause downtime, and saving money. The money that you do save can be used to capitalise on the opportunity of new technologies, such as LLMs.
It doesn’t stop there. Your engineering teams will be more productive because they’ll have a deeper understanding of the service, usage and demand. In addition, with that understanding, your business will be more scalable, ramping up or down cloud as is needed. And an ancillary benefit of fewer service outages is giving your customers a better user experience.
The Capacitas approach to cloud cost optimisation
We start with a free diagnostic to identify the size of your optimisation opportunity. From there, the rest of the programme unfurls.
- Discover – we help you build an implementation plan to deliver the optimisation, complete with set phased targets and a plan to overcome any barriers
- Realise – we work with your teams to make the optimisations a reality and validate them in live
- Transform – we help your teams to shift their mindsets and deliver optimisation as on ongoing engineering practice
- Support – we support you to maintain the gains as your business grows
How to get there
The goal of cloud cost optimisation isn’t just a short term one. Short term gains, yes, but coupled with long term cost efficiency in a sustainable way. We see true cost optimisation as a cultural shift, embedded new behaviours and a deeper understanding of cloud usage and future costs.
We’ve been helping clients reach these goals for more than 12 years by delivering major cost/performance optimisation programmes. To find out how we can help your business get the true value from cloud, get in touch with us today.
To find out more about cloud cost optimisation and building a cost-efficient organisation, download our whitepaper.
