The Main Points to Consider When Measuring the Cloud
Following cloud trends and keeping up with the benefits it offers is a good thing to do but you always have to think about at which cost. Businesses should constantly consider the points to measure cloud success and think of further strategic moves and ways to improve this experience.
It’s not that obvious but essential to find a tool that evaluates the benefits that the cloud brings for the company. Not only it helps to decide whether all this cloud migration idea is worth it, but it also can encourage your team members to start using new technology with open minds and hearts.
No matter what cloud management strategy has been chosen – cloud management platform deployment or native tools usage – there are several ways to measure the productivity and wellbeing of your cloud infrastructure as a whole.
One of the possible options is to create the Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) that takes full responsibility for working with the cloud and starts tracking the cloud Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s). The CCoE team can help the organization monitor and manage cloud costs and resources utilization rates in a more effective way. Below we consider the notion of Cloud Center of Excellence.
Cloud Center of Excellence
A Cloud Center of Excellence is a team of specialists who are in charge of various cloud processes: migration, adoption, operations, and management. This unit can be also called Cloud Competency Center or Cloud Knowledge Center.
The CCoE is tasked to implement the cloud strategy and best practices that transform the way the company uses the cloud. It presents the points to consider when assessing your cloud journey success and gives you the opportunity to see whether you get the most out of your cloud investment.
There are 2 types of factors that business owners should pay attention to for evaluating overall cloud performance:
We will start with the financial ones.
Financial Points to Measure Cloud
The main goal of cloud deployment lies in the improvement of the general effectiveness of the company’s performance. But what else should be considered?
We suggest starting from finding out the cost of deploying cloud architecture, namely:
It helps to compare spendings on cloud and on-prem software to see what is more beneficial: to invest in traditional IT or start deploying cloud environments, or both.
On-Premises Costs
A move to the cloud is usually going alongside changing a CAPEX (Capital expenditures) financial model to OPEX (Operating expenses) to see whether the cloud is more profitable for your organization. To compare your cloud cost with the on-premises one, you need to convert the total cost of ownership of the data center into an operating cost. There are several parameters to think of below:
Cloud Migration Costs
These points will help business owners to translate on-premises costs into cloud operating costs. So, if you’re planning to kill two birds with one stone and continue hosting applications in-house as well as use the cloud, don’t forget about development, management, and recruitment costs.
Cloud Operating Costs
One of your primary concerns for companies is to lower operational costs. This goal can be reached with the help of constant monitoring, analyzing, and optimizing cloud expenses. Here are some factors for you to pay attention to:
Cloud Profitability
It’s good to know that your effort paid off. To evaluate the worth of cloud investments observe the points that will help you identify the profit from cloud computing deployment.
Business Points to Measure Cloud
Consideration of financial factors is vital but it’s also beneficial to take into account other cloud aspects too. For instance, it may include better performance or agility that leads to business development in a long-term perspective.
In this section, we will talk about non-financial aspects connected to cloud management strategy and optimization of cloud architecture such as:
These factors can give you a broader holistic view of your cloud environment. So, business measuring points in this case include:
Cloud Management
The cloud is scalable and that is one of the main advantages of this type of IT environment. However, many companies start suffering from uncontrolled cloud sprawl, as the scaling possibility of the cloud is infinite. A solid cloud management strategy is an indispensable condition of keeping cost and security stable.
Automation in Cloud
Automation of all the processes if it’s safe for overall performance is recommended in cloud architecture. The reduction of manual workload may not only save your IT team members time for implementing more relevant tasks but also minimize the occurrence of human errors.
Customer Satisfaction
By focusing on the development of your IT and cost optimization you can leave one factor unnoticed – how much your customers enjoy their interaction with your business?
Stakeholder Interest
Changes are threatening in most cases, so business owners should think about their staff attitude towards moving to the cloud. It’s vital to demonstrate the positive sides of cloud computing deployment and get everyone acquainted with your cloud migration plan.
How to Integrate These Recommendations in Your Company
We dived deeper into cloud journey experience and presented several factors that should be tracked by your CCoE. But what is the following step? What to do if the company doesn’t have CCoE? If it has one, how to facilitate all the processes and save money and time?
Third-party tools as cloud management platforms (CMPs) can monitor the utilization and costs of your applications, ensure compliance adherence, recommend how to reduce spendings, and provide better security of your cloud environment. Additionally, CMP can help you with reaching greater visibility to simplify the process of decision-making.
Cloud management platform Binadox can help companies to deal with all of these tasks, even in multi-cloud architecture:
Try Binadox for the 14-day trial period for FREE and start deploying your cloud architecture to the fullest extent.