Tech Talk: How To Reduce Cloud Costs in a Tight Economic Climate
“Choppy economic waters are not only putting pressure on available funding, but also forcing enterprises to rethink their expenditure and [cloud] cost structure.” In this Tech Talk, Jeff Kukowski, CEO, CloudBolt, shares how IT leaders can optimize costs, if cloud inefficiencies are costing them more than staying with on-prem data centers.
Jeff Kukowski, CEO, CloudBolt, joins Neha Kulkarni to discuss how to improve cloud infrastructure and its development costs to streamline automation in a tight economic climate. Kukowski talks about how automation can save the day and help enterprises to automate, optimize, and govern their complex cloud environments.
In this edition of Tech Talk, Kukowski discusses the automation trends that are most likely to shape the future of cloud in 2023 and how enterprises can stay ahead of the curve.
Key Takeaways on How To Reduce Cloud Costs:
- The more shadow IT grows, the more it drains money and the more security vulnerabilities are created
- Multi-cloud today requires an overarching framework approach, where IT has visibility across all clouds
- The goal is rarely automation for the explicit purpose of eliminating people through efficiency.
Here are the edited excerpts from our exclusive interview with Jeff Kukowski, CEO, CloudBolt:
SWNI: The global economy is now headed in a grim direction, and it is forcing enterprises to rethink their expenditure and cost structure. What role is enterprise IT playing in rationalizing IT assets?
Jeff: IT’s role is becoming increasingly interwoven with DevOps.
In a typical enterprise, IT delivers resources and infrastructure to developers so they can build custom applications and better meet customer needs. The developer puts in a request to IT for a certain amount of storage, networking, capacity, etc., and then waits on IT to deliver.
Unfortunately, IT has a lot on their plates. They are managing cloud resources, developing provisioning processes, and trying to ensure compliance with security requirements across the enterprise. They often don’t get back to developers in a timely manner, and often don’t have what the developers are looking for. Developers, meanwhile, are under growing pressure to deliver more value and increase time to market. They want what they ask for as soon as possible and don’t have time to wait for IT tickets to be resolved.
This results in the proliferation of shadow IT, where developers circumvent IT and order and spin up the resources they need with a credit card. IT has no knowledge of or visibility into shadow IT, so they can’t govern or secure these resources. The more shadow IT grows, the more it drains money and the more security vulnerabilities are created.
If IT doesn’t establish a robust, self-service IT system where developers can adopt whatever tool or resource they need, and find existing modules, integrations and provisioning resources in a common exchange that builds intrinsic security and governance into the equation, the grim global economy will become even more of a burden to the enterprise.
SWNI: One area where 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?
Jeff: The first and most important thing is visibility. If you can’t see it, you can’t track, govern, secure or automate it.
“78% of IT leaders say they do not have adequate visibility into who’s provisioning what, where to optimize costs and how to remediate security issues.”
Hybrid cloud environments keep growing larger and more complex. Development teams spread out across the organization will adopt different cloud tools and use them for their own purposes, without any alignment or coordination between them. The same tool could be purchased multiple times. Tools that are not optimal could be used because proven best practices between teams aren’t being shared. Everything needs to be custom coded, creating layers of “spaghetti code” that blur visibility and are ripe for misconfigurations. And once again, there’s the issue of shadow IT, which IT departments don’t even know about, let alone monitor.
Most enterprises are still manually aggregating cloud data from multiple clouds and sources, usually with spreadsheets. Multi-cloud today requires an overarching framework approach, where IT has visibility across all clouds and pulls data on any cloud resource and views it, all from a single place. Establishing this cross-visibility and interoperability is the only way an enterprise can effectively control costs and pinpoint areas of waste and duplicative processes.
See More: The Promises Vs Realities of Hybrid Cloud: Tech Talk With CIO, Snow Software
SWNI: In what ways can CIOs and IT leaders improve cloud infrastructure and its development costs to streamline automation in a tight economic climate?
Jeff: Enterprises have numerous areas affecting CloudOps – DevOps, FinOps, ITOps and SecOps. Each of those have multiple teams using multiple clouds and automation tools. Each group prefers different tools, processes and cloud service providers, creating siloed pockets of preferences, tool sprawl and custom code. These fragmented silos become islands of automation, operating in their own way, without visibility and control from IT or anybody else in the organization.
“Management decisions and actions are oriented toward whatever is best for that department and not aligned with the organization as a whole. And there is little to no best practice reuse of blueprints, code, elements, etc. from island to island – a major missed opportunity for greater efficiency.”
These islands can be connected with a shared content repository, accessible by all developer groups, that enables reuse of critical elements such as blueprints, code, scripts, and integrations.
If one team adopts and integrates an automation tool, all other teams can see it in the repository and use the same integration and policies, because they have already been created and blessed. If multiple teams are working on something similar, they can all use the same previously approved automated process. Each team doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel every time they use a new tool, and best practices can be seamlessly shared and adopted, saving time and money and improving efficiency.
SWNI: How can the ‘Great Automation’ be a core measure of IT efficiency driving not only costs down, but stock valuations up?
Jeff: Given current uncertainty in the global economic climate, companies are now more than ever looking for ways to do more with less – shifting from “The Great Resignation” to increased and more pervasive automation – aka “The Great Automation.”
Choppy economic waters are not only putting pressure on available funding, but also forcing enterprises to rethink their expenditure and cost structure.
“As enterprises are looking to cut costs, they are also increasingly looking at automation and reusability of capabilities that may exist in silos to bring new levels of efficiencies.”
Especially in merger and acquisition scenarios – which tend to be a common inorganic growth strategy during economic slowdowns – enterprise IT is increasingly playing a bigger role in rationalizing IT assets by automating more of them. By implementing tools that enhance automation – slashing infrastructure and development costs and streamlining processes – enterprises can not only cut costs down, but also help bring their stock valuations up.
See More: How Modernizing Legacy Apps Reduces Technical Debt: vFunction CEO Explains
SWNI: The ‘Great Automation’ can inspire fear about job losses or humans abandoning control to robot overlords. Can you share a business case where automation saved the day and helped enterprises to automate, optimize, and govern their complex cloud environments?
Jeff: If you think about Cloud users as a distribution curve, CloudBolt’s most advanced customers (far right end of the curve) are what we designate “Cloud Mature.” They have been in Cloud for a while, worked their way through the whole cloud hype cycle, have some battle scars from moving to multi-cloud, and are oftentimes seeking to act as an internal managed service provider to the rest of their global organizations.
As they have brought higher degrees of efficiency and automation to all their constituents, they have “given back” time for highly paid/highly skilled workers to do more important work than spinning up infrastructure, knowing the intricacies of IaC tools, or chasing down cloud costs and allocations.
“It was reported recently that developers spend upwards of 19% of their available time in a given month dealing with setting up the infrastructure and workloads they need to do their jobs. Almost one day per week is wasted on things that should be easy, no-brainers.”
The goal is rarely automation for the explicit purpose of eliminating people through efficiency. Rather, how can the company get more lift using the same number of resources it has by allowing them to be more effective and focus their precious time on the things that matter most? This isn’t a zero-sum game because the “pie” is not static – the goal is growth and expansion, and you need people focused on the right things to achieve that without having to add additional headcount.
See More: Tech Talk: Why Visual Solutions Are Crucial to the Cloud
SWNI: Which automation trends are most likely to shape the future of cloud in 2023 and how can enterprises stay ahead of the curve?
Jeff: Increasingly, the need for “reuse” is going to emerge as a top trend. As multi-cloud grows and scales, and as all the dimensions of cloud ops attempt to work more seamlessly together (IT Ops, DevOps, FinOps, Secops, etc.), a common repository for all “automations” will become essential. Companies are currently using a mish-mash of tools like GitHub, SharePoint, OneDrive, Google Drive or even Box and DropBox – often with different groups using different things; however, this does little to make it simple to find things that are needed across jobs. What’s needed is a single overarching repository. Whether code, apps, documentation, blueprints, settings or specifications, making vital, approved cloud automation elements that work available for others across the enterprise will provide even greater efficiency and automation. And in the wake of the Great Resignation, a Home for Automations” helps ensure business continuity.
Going forward, enterprises will need to significantly reduce their reliance on custom coding by using deep, pre-built integrations for many automation tools. As we already discussed, integrations that do have to be created need only be created once, and then made available to all other teams across the enterprise in a shared content repository. This will save a tremendous amount of time and resources.
“Organizations will also need automated alert and visualization systems that notify stakeholders of the fiscal impact of the many daily decisions they make.”
For example, a developer might spin up a test environment or virtual machine and then forget to shut it down. Or they might choose to provision an expensive public cloud resource when a cheaper option is available that is just as safe and efficient. Or they might unknowingly create a security vulnerability. Thousands of these liabilities accrue over time and cost enterprises millions of dollars. Wth 360-degree visibility across all clouds and on-prem systems, automation can be leveraged to nip them in the bud before that happens.
Jeff Kukowski is CEO at CloudBolt, which helps companies automate easily, optimize continuously and govern at scale in hybrid and multi cloud, multitool environments. Building companies and category-leading solutions across all stages, industry verticals, geographies, technologies and cultures, Jeff has scaled companies from every stage – including start up, venture-funded to exit, private equity backed, and public company turnarounds.
About CloudBolt
CloudBolt helps companies automate easily, optimize continuously, and govern at scale in hybrid and multi-cloud, multi-tool environments. Pulling together islands of automation, our framework helps unify disparate capabilities for DevOps, ITOps, FinOps, and SecOps.
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
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