Johannesburg, 12 Jun 2023
The past few years have seen the rapid acceleration of cloud services among companies of all sizes, and from all sectors, and this is only going to continue to ramp up as more companies see the flexibility, elasticity and innovation they are accessing via the hyperscalers together with their traditional CSPs (cloud service providers).
An IDC study conducted last year found that 70% of South African chief information and technology officers believe public cloud applications are essential for their organisation’s technological transformation,[1] and many have embraced a multicloud strategy to bridge the gap between their own data centre environments and their cloud services.
Despite the growing number of cloud investments South African organisations are making, many are finding it challenging to navigate the growing complexity of their environments. A recent Flexera survey found that even though there are various reasons why enterprises might move their computing to the cloud, the top one, at 61%, is cost-cutting initiatives. While many organisations achieve instant wins, they all too often find themselves spending far more than they thought they would.
Know what you are getting into
Companies who have migrated workloads to the cloud primarily in order to save costs have found this is a far more complex undertaking than they thought. With the growing number of cloud services used by most organisations – some of which are not approved upfront by the technology and financial decision-makers – the cost of cloud environments can quickly spiral out of control.
In addition, the shift from an opex to a capex model can be intimidating if the organisation is not completely clear on what exactly is being purchased, how frequently it is needed and how and why existing infrastructure should come into the mix. TCO can be just as complicated to work out, particularly in a hybrid environment where companies are scaling up and down frequently, and to a much greater extent than expected.
These concerns and challenges are so common that iOCO has designed a solution to help companies better manage their cloud spend and performance. Many organisations don’t have the ability to dedicate a finance team to cloud management. Our FinOps as a service offering not only helps finance teams gain more insight into, and control over, cloud spend, but includes the training and support the organisation needs to ensure better performance through things like quality assurance and testing.
Moving from orchestration to optimisation
Cloud management has become increasingly important as multicloud environments have grown. While multicloud undeniably offers great benefits for organisations, it does create challenges with regard to a single view across the multiple platforms a company has deployed as well as the provisioning and management of workloads.
Unfortunately, simply plugging a cloud management platform (CMP) into the business has not – and will not – achieve the desired results. Cost management is just the tip of the iceberg and organisations require more than a dashboard to show them what is being used, and at what cost. What companies need is a way not only to better manage their cloud ecosystems, but a way to get granular visibility and insight into every area of that ecosystem.
What cloud users, whether techies or businesspeople, want is true interoperability. This goes beyond simple cloud API compatibility to handling different behaviours across different cloud providers, and, most importantly, a single place to access all of the cloud apps and functionality the business uses. CloudBolt, for example, enables the business to create, provision, monitor and manage all their different cloud services, with one portal providing access to whatever they need.
Offering an intuitive self-service interface, CloudBolt offers multicloud enablement, hybrid cloud automation and granular visibility across all cloud environments. A portal for DevOps and software development simplifies deployment and cloud-agnostic workload delivery ensures that provisioning is quick and easy.
CloudBolt’s dashboards, reporting and analytics provide visibility and control throughout a company’s entire cloud estate, down to the granular level. Easily integrated into legacy systems, CloudBolt provides the most effective means of achieving the visibility and transparency companies need across their ecosystem while guaranteeing governance, security and operational efficiency. With CloudBolt implemented properly, companies can go beyond orchestration to true optimisation.
[1] https://mybroadband.co.za/news/cloud-hosting/475413-cloud-explosion-in-south-africa.html
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