Tech Talk: How To Optimize Cloud Costs Where Its Most Needed

“Cloud cost is hard to plan, optimize and prioritize if you don’t understand what it was used for.” In this Tech Talk, David Williams, SVP of market strategy, Quali, shares the role of infrastructure automation in a cloud strategy.

February 14, 2023

As Quali’s SVP of market strategy, David Williams talks about how continuous software delivery processes and ephemeral workloads are exacerbating the IT talent shortage, he tells Spiceworks News & Insights’ Technology Editor, Neha Kulkarni. If an organization has no way to plan, monitor and measure when, how and why the cloud is used, ongoing costs will remain a challenge, he informs.

In this edition of Tech Talk, David shares the role of infrastructure automation in a cloud strategy. He discusses how organizations not only need to understand costs but prioritize the cost against the usage.

Key Points:

  • Automation can be polarizing with automation only supporting a specific type of infrastructure
  • Cloud usage can be prioritized, optimized, and planned in line with value
  • Move to cloud should be more than short term tangible savings

Here are the edited excerpts from our exclusive interview with David Williams, SVP of Market Strategy, Quali:

                            

David Williams, SVP of Market Strategy, Quali

David Williams, SVP of Market Strategy, Quali

 


SWNI: Talent shortage is one of the most critical challenges to multi-cloud deployment since the pandemic. What do some of these challenges look like and what they mean for organizations?

David: IT talent shortages have always existed. However, cloud, multi-cloud, complex application infrastructure stacks, continuous software delivery processes and ephemeral workloads are exacerbating the problem. While markets were healthy and growing, the need to constantly assess cloud usage, understand the value and purpose, and hire increasingly expensive talent was not done with the urgency it is now.

 The pandemic forced organizations to re-evaluate their cloud strategy timeline. Applications and services needed to transform much faster to meet the immediate needs of the highly distributed digital world. To achieve this required greater adoption of multi-cloud and edge computing.

The speed organizations must now move to deliver new and enhanced cloud-based applications demands highly skilled people, lots of them. Without these ‘full-stack’, ‘multi-cloud’ skills, cloud usage becomes fragmented with different teams using whatever they choose to automate and work with the different clouds. This creates inconsistencies with execution, policies, and on-going support.

Highly skilled multi-cloud personnel are in constant demand resulting in ongoing turnover with intellectual know-how lost every time someone leaves. This can result in people with lower skills covering for the departure or time lost while finding a qualified replacement.

The ramifications of the multi-cloud skills void have an impact across a company. What may be seen as a technical hiring challenge has a far-ranging impact. While talent has diverse skills, is hard to retain, expensive to hire and train, and lives in organizational siloes, the impacts on the business are way more significant. Momentum is inhibited, cloud usage becomes hard to manage, risk is difficult to assess, accessibility to cloud resources is slow and inconsistent. If cloud cost is impossible to assess against the value delivered, then cloud planning, optimization, and prioritization are a long-winded, inaccurate dark art.

Processes, execution, and governance suffer especially when it comes to managing change, the time it takes to create, deliver and support cloud infrastructure, and understanding and managing the risk.

SWNI: How can organizations best overcome the talent shortage challenges and what role should infrastructure automation have in their strategy?

David: Automation can be polarizing with automation only supporting a specific type of infrastructure, or if using Infrastructure as Code (IaC), creating infrastructure only the creator understands. Both approaches create islands of automation and do not address the need for scarce talent.

The answer to solving this is a solution that supports all infrastructure types, strategic and legacy, and allows organizations to leverage existing skills without forcing them to re-train or abandon what is already in use.

Strategically, the answer is to have a mix of infrastructure skills able to satisfy the specific short-term and long-term needs of the business, using a platform that unifies different automation files and file types allowing infrastructure to be delivered and governed easily and consistently.

See More: How much do cloud phone systems cost in 2023?

SWNI: One area which companies are struggling to manage is their cloud environments. How can IT leaders understand where to optimize costs, if cloud inefficiencies are costing them more than staying with on-prem data centers?

David: Cloud cost is hard to plan, optimize and prioritize if you don’t understand what it was used for. A key challenge is a lack of context. Each time the cloud is used, it needs to be associated with a purpose. The purpose can be an application, project, or pipeline.

There is no easy way to estimate the real costs and savings associated with moving from an on-premises infrastructure to a cloud infrastructure.

The variables must factor in tangibles like building costs, power and cooling and the TCO for hardware plus intangibles like compute elasticity, rate of change and speed of delivery. However, a decision to move to cloud should be more than short term tangible savings. If an organization has no way to plan, monitor and measure when, how and why the cloud is used, ongoing costs will remain a challenge.

See More: How To Reduce the Cost of High Availability in Google Cloud Platform

SWNI: Today’s DevOps and IT teams are finding that the pool of talent capable of maintaining this infrastructure is limited, while competition for these personnel becomes increasingly fierce. What can modern DevOps teams do to help keep their DevOps and developer teams productive and happy?

David: The lack of infrastructure expertise is not made any easier by the automation tools commonly used to create and deliver it. Now the job of automating infrastructure requires infrastructure knowledge and programming or scripting skills.

Making DevOps teams more effective demands solutions. It simplifies the creation and delivery of the infrastructure yet allows the few resources with the skills to work with the infrastructure to provide what the teams need faster and with lower risk.

This helps ensure developers and DevOps teams can concentrate on their jobs and eliminate as much frustration as possible.

SWNI: With the continued rise in cloud adoption, what is the importance of enterprises taking control of their infrastructure assets?

David: Scaling in the cloud opens the doors to flexibility, but when organizations are up against an optimization strategy and tighter budgets for cloud resources, they need the ability to not just have visibility into usage but gain that control to prioritize the usage. Having an insight into how the cloud is being used will allow organizations not only to understand costs but prioritize the cost against the usage. One way to gain this visibility is with an infrastructure control plane that breaks down what is being used and why it’s being used and then associates different blueprints with a common outcome.

See More: 5 Ways for Businesses to Make a Seamless Transition to Hybrid Cloud

SWNI: As we head into the new year, what do you believe will be some of the biggest trends in cloud adoption?

David: While digital transformation initiatives and the traditional mix of low cost of entry, usage elasticity and high availability will continue to influence cloud adoption, it’s the uncertain market conditions that will create the biggest trend.

The result of this is that no-one in an enterprise has a holistic understanding of how cloud is being used. Skills to use it are becoming scarce and costs as they relate to business value are a mystery.

IT spend is accountable to the business no matter where it is sourced which is driving the business to take an active role in demanding cloud cost transparency. Traditional approaches of taking the billed cost and then trying to work out what was used and why are unscalable and inaccurate. The ability to adjust spend is critical which will mean cloud cost becomes predictable, measured and planned. To do this will require new solutions able to associate usage with value and cost with results.

About David Williams

David Williams is SVP of Market Strategy at Quali, a leading provider of Environments-as-a-Service infrastructure automation solutions.

About Quali

Quali provides the leading platform for Environments as a Service. Global 2000 enterprises rely on Quali’s infrastructure automation and control plane platform to support the continuous delivery of application software at scale. Quali delivers greater control and visibility over infrastructure, so businesses can increase engineering productivity and velocity, understand and manage cloud costs, optimize infrastructure utilization and mitigate risk.

About Tech Talk

Tech Talk is an interview series that features notable CTOs and senior technology executives from around the world. Join us as we talk to these technology and IT leaders who share their insights and research on data, analytics, and emerging technologies. If you are a tech expert and wish to share your thoughts, write to neha.pradhan@swzd.com

How can organizations optimize cloud costs in the future? Share your findings with us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter .

Image Source: Shutterstock

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Neha Pradhan Kulkarni
Neha Pradhan Kulkarni

Technology Editor, Spiceworks Ziff Davis

Neha Pradhan Kulkarni is our Technology Editor. She oversees coverage of IT leadership, digital transformation, cloud, data security, and emerging technologies. Neha is in charge of tech interview series called Tech Talk and Ask the CXO. She has previously worked for Dentsu Aegis Network's iProspect and Ugam. When she is not reading or writing, you can find her traveling to new places, interacting with new people, and engaging in debates. You can reach her at neha.pradhan@swzd.com
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