Cloud adoption is growing and many companies that went all in on a single hyperscale cloud are quickly experiencing something they didn’t expect—a rapid spike in costs, sometimes two to five times what was expected at the onset of the effort. For businesses that selected cloud based on the promise of predictable pricing and cost efficiencies, this can put a sudden halt to their journey.
This places businesses in a tough spot. They know digital transformation is essential and the cloud will be the key enabler to this journey—statistics show that by 2022, 85% of businesses are expected to use cloud services, up from 42% in 2020*.
But knowing what you want to accomplish is one thing. Accomplishing it while avoiding any surprises is something else entirely. A multi-cloud environment is vital to a successful transformation and getting it right requires the guidance of experts employing an operational approach that can help accelerate your digital transformation while yielding maximum value.
This approach is based on the idea of balance, which varies from one business to the next. With an expert team examining all workloads and applications, it’s likely you will uncover adjustments that can be made to distribute workloads to the optimal cloud platform. It may be recommended to move some workloads to Microsoft Azure, others to Expedient Enterprise Cloud, while having others remain on-premises. By optimizing workloads based on each cloud’s unique characteristics, the organization can remove bottlenecks and achieve more predictable pricing.
This should be welcome news to companies that find themselves stuck in a convoluted environment with workloads spread over multiple clouds with limited visibility into each. Do you remember how long your migration took and how much you spent moving data that could have stayed on-premises? For many businesses the answer is no.
Finding the right cloud for the workload can dramatically accelerate the cloud migration while reducing associated fees. By pairing Expedient’s Enterprise Cloud for steady-state workloads with Azure for highly variable workloads oftentimes employing serverless, big data, AI/ML and other forward-leaning services, you can realize best-in-class capabilities and a pay-as-you-grow scalability for cost control. As a result, your business won’t be caught off-guard by sudden spikes in pricing.
In addition, by applying this approach to your migration, you can avoid costly data transfer charges that can be incurred with hyperscale clouds, specifically when it comes to egress fees. This is accomplished by determining those items with high and low flow data transfers and during migration, placing applications with high data transfer needs in locations that don’t include transfer charges, like Expedient’s Enterprise Cloud.
When businesses leverage predictable pricing while eliminating these costly fees, they are equipped to make intelligent cost comparisons as well as more informed decisions around run rates and other factors to align with budgets.
Business will also be ready to fully maximize the benefits that come with having Azure as part of their multi-cloud environment. This includes valuable Azure credits that companies receive when signing up. Now, instead of burning through available credits indiscriminately migrating workloads into Azure, they can leverage key Azure services that are truly vital to the company.
The future lies in the cloud. However, a delicate balance must be reached to get there while avoiding unwanted spending that could have been earmarked for other initiatives. Receive a complimentary assessment from Expedient to help you determine what to migrate, what to modernize, and what to maintain on-premises, all while keeping costs under control.
*Frost & Sullivan: Breaking Through The Digital Transformation Plateau
