Article The Top Cloud Challenge for ISVs: Balancing Cost and Performance
By Insight UK / 3 Nov 2021 / Topics: Cloud
By Insight UK / 3 Nov 2021 / Topics: Cloud
Managing IT costs has become a critical consideration for ISVs. End users want speed: in innovation, in time-to-market, in expanding in different markets. For ISVs, this means that they have to offer their end users even more flexibility to be more productive and effective, while keeping a sharp eye on budget and costs.
How do ISVs ensure that cost optimization becomes a permanent and recurring part of their business operations? Not necessarily to achieve the lowest costs, but rather to balance the costs in relation to equally important business objectives such as performance, reliability and security.
It may seem like a paradox, but you don't optimize costs only once, after you have migrated one or more workloads to the cloud. Consistent application of a number of cost principles will allow you to be agile and respond to end user demands without the burden of high costs. Therefore, cost optimization is important at every stage of your IT environment: in designing, provisioning, monitoring and managing your applications. In greenfield and brownfield deployment. So, what can you do?
Consider offering cloud-delivered and cloud-managed services where possible to balance cost and performance. This applies to upgrading applications to the cloud, but certainly to applications built entirely in the cloud, where ISVs can take full advantage of cloud features such as containerization, microservices, scalability and more. All management and operations delivered in a PaaS or SaaS cloud model brings simplicity on a recurring basis. By eliminating valuable time and costs for managing servers, storage, networking, and other application infrastructure, ISVs can optimize their cost structure and free up budget to develop new business activities and services, without compromising performance.
Automate at large scale. Whatever cloud resources you deploy to provision your workloads, make sure that you use tools that support automation by design to optimize the cost of your resources in relation to usage. It may sound corny, but most mistakes – and therefore unintended costs – come from human actions. Automation avoids unnecessary costs and increases performance. An additional advantage is that automation, if done correctly, also contributes to more efficient processes, for example in the activation of services and remote maintenance.
92% of organizations’ IT environment is at least somewhat in the cloud today, says IDG. Most ISVs run applications in both on-premise and external data centres too, often with different cloud providers. It is quite difficult to manage and monitor such a hybrid and/or multi-cloud environment, while monitoring is essential to optimize costs, performance and other business objectives. Vendors such as VMware, Microsoft and Citrix have responded with an array of useful programs and tools let you master complex IT environments and continuously optimize cost and performance.
These are just three basic examples of how ISVs can systematically embed cost optimization into the different stages of their cloud journey. We at Insight have been working with partners like you across Europe for many years, providing valuable time, knowledge and support in many (hybrid) cloud scenarios. We can help you monitor and optimize your cloud cost, map it against your existing budget, and suggest on improvements that will lower your total cost.
Contact one of our cloud specialists to find out how we can support you in optimizing your cloud costs in line with your business goals, whether you are designing your first workloads in the cloud or work entirely cloud-based.
This article is part of a series of articles based on Microsoft’s WAF (Well-Architected Framework), where you find much more helpful guidance. WAF improves the quality of workloads operating in the cloud by focusing on a set of common architecture principles, including cost optimization, operational excellence, performance efficiency, reliability and security.
As a multi-vendor software licensing, workload and platform specialist, we can guide you through all stages of your strategic cloud journey with a series of workshops, assessments, services and best practices. From the first exploration of cloud or hybrid opportunities and benefits to support and optimization after migration. No matter where you are in your journey, we help you to find new ways forward and accelerate your business.
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