Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once said: “We co-evolve with our tools. So, we invent new tools, and then our tools change us”.
By Richard Vester, managing executive: EMEA AWS practice at iOCO
The cloud is a perfect example of this, drastically altering organisational landscapes globally, enabling instant collaboration and accelerating development cycles, profoundly impacting everything from remote gig work to AI-enabled business operations.
The success of the cloud has led to an unexpected drawback – as cloud adoption increases rapidly across all industries, organisations are faced with unexpected cloud bills due to overprovisioned resources and a lack of governance required for cloud financial management.
Many businesses have started hiring consultants or creating teams to look for ways to optimise their cloud environments, but these are usually done as single point-in-time exercises, and very few achieve long-term efficiencies and savings.
Some organisations get the latest and greatest tools and technology for visibility into their cloud spend. They create budget alerts, but these are often pointless because they don’t always reflect the reality of how the cloud is being used by the company.
Many companies are discovering that while technology is an important enabler of cloud optimisation, it’s not enough. To optimise effectively and sustainably, the business must acknowledge the people behind the keyboards and the impact of the human element.
A people problem
The human element has long been a focus area in cloud security, with misconfiguration and inadequate change control, as well as Identity and Access Management (IAM), being the top threats facing companies. Optimisation, however, is still not seen as a people problem.
In reality, the people configuring the cloud platform are as responsible for cost overruns as those using it, and while tools can help with visibility into cloud spend, people still have to actually log in and review dashboards, interpret the optimisation recommendations, drive the necessary changes across teams, and own the ongoing cost management programme. In other words, tools enable people – they don’t replace them. Unfortunately, the skills within most businesses are not at a level that allows sustainable optimisation efforts.
The complexity of the design of the cloud platform makes it harder for people without sufficient skills or experience to identify areas for optimisation. In addition, most organisations are not structured correctly to ensure best practice adoption and visibility across the different parts of the organisation, and as a result, they don’t have a clear practice that can help them understand how best to optimise what they are currently consuming from a cloud perspective.
Similarly, too many business leaders associate optimisation with cost cutting, but its primary objective is to improve efficiency. This means applying cloud spend in the most optimal way to drive the best business outcomes, which might actually require spending more in certain cases. While businesses continue to focus only on the technology and cost-cutting efforts in their attempts to improve their cloud environments, they will continue to fail in their optimisation efforts.
A new way to look at optimisation
A combination of the right tools and the right expertise is the only way to improve the performance and economics of the cloud. Optimisation is a complex endeavour which requires an understanding of how the cloud is configured, as well as how it is being used. Most importantly, it requires an understanding of what the company is trying to achieve in its cloud environment.
Organisations often don’t evaluate how much time they spend on optimisation compared to producing new features and deliverables. In some cases, delivering innovation makes up for the higher cloud costs incurred. Businesses should rather start looking at different ways to measure the effectiveness of their cloud environments.
Without the critical input provided by people with the right expertise to enable the cloud as a platform for innovation – one that continuously adjusts the balance between workload performance and cost – companies will continue to struggle.