$12.9 billion will be wasted on mis-allocated public cloud resources this year. Running your business in the cloud requires you to be as efficient as possible, and we are not just talking about costs. Every second of CPU, each byte of data, and every service activated has an impact on how efficiently you operate your business in the cloud.
Prior to public cloud services, it was easy to over-provision server resources or the capacity of a storage array. Once the PO was signed and the server was racked in the data center, there was no real inspection or accountability on the cost/performance efficiency of that purchase.
For years, IT managers and CIOs (myself included!) found it much easier to just over-provision network, storage, and compute rather than face the wrath of disgruntled DBAs, or worse, end-users complaining of poor application performance.
To be fair, the over-provisioning happened because DBAs and application developers had no real idea how their databases or applications would perform once in production. The lack of visibility into application performance or the ability to tune network/compute/storage resources in real time made over-provisioning the only true way to ensure job security.
Jump forward several server refresh cycles and, even with the adoption of virtualization and hyper-convergence, IT managers still have a hard time predicting how an application will perform on their IT vendor stack of choice. There are very good performance visibility tools available to IT managers: Application Performance Management (APM) tools such as AppDynamics (AppD); server/storage resource management platforms such as Turbonomic (Turbo), which can give you all the performance data that you could ever need to make sizing decisions.
The problem is, most business use these tools after they have already sunk hard-earned dollars into server and storage hardware.
The answer to this never-ending issue: Stop buying server and storage hardware!
These products have been so commoditized that it is much more effective to buy these resources as a service. AWS, Azure, GCP—all offer cost-effective, easy-to-manage platforms to consume compute and storage resources as a service. Couple public cloud with tools like AppD and Turbo, and you can tune and consume resources as needed without any “sunk” hardware costs.
Any public cloud infrastructure needs to be managed. Just as a mistake can be made with a hardware purchase, the mis-provisioning of cloud services can impact costs. This is why having the proper governance and compliance of public cloud resources is critical to any successful public cloud initiative.
Pinnacle has developed the PeakPlus CONTROL service for cloud that provides the visibility, security and compliance that a business needs as it looks to leverage the advantages of public cloud providers.
The side benefit to the efficient governance of cloud resources is that, on average, our PeakPlus clients save 25 percent on their monthly public cloud-spend. With all the data the PeakPlus platform collects, we have the data to prove it.
Email me for a 30-minute demo of our public cloud governance service, and I will send you $100 Amazon gift card to show it to you.