By Paul Rix, CEO, Zanaris, and Randall Singh, Partner Manager, Microsoft Practice, BCM One
Many customers believe that migrating most services to the cloud will get them to the end of the digital-transformation rainbow. However, instead of a pot of opex gold, many discover a whole new set of challenges in three areas:
IT consultants, agents and MSPs who can address these three problems can differentiate their services. Here’s the scoop on these cloud realities — and guidance on how you can help your customers take charge.
One of the biggest attractions of cloud computing is that you pay only for what you use. That’s a huge benefit as long as you spin down idle or under-utilized servers. Customers expect to see spikes and contractions based on the variability of business needs. But easy scalability – another key benefit – means that more applications and storage might move into the cloud even when that’s not the best option. This “cloud creep” can result in constant expansion without the offsetting contractions that you or your customers expected, which in extreme cases can lead them to repatriate workloads.
This challenge is compounded when companies can’t easily analyze their cloud costs or determine the financial efficiency of running a given service onsite versus with a cloud provider. Several factors contribute to the problem. First, it’s common for enterprises to lack clarity about exactly which services they need. Paying for unneeded options and foregoing ones that would benefit them can erode the benefits of the cloud. Second, many cloud-service bills are vague, so you as a partner simply don’t get the data you need to understand what’s driving the spikes and dips in costs. It also makes it nearly impossible to accurately allocate the cost of cloud assets to associated departments to manage charge backs.
How can customers explain increasing cloud spend to their CFOs when they don’t understand it themselves?
How to take charge:
Getting workloads into the cloud is only the first step. You need to …
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