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What is Your Cloud Migration Readiness?

A rigorous assessment of the business objectives and a well-defined migration plan are critical to realize the benefits of moving IT activities from your legacy on-premises infrastructure to a public cloud provider. Any technical gap or delay in cloud migration will erode the economics and benefits of the cloud with unexpected expenses and performance issues. To that point, a recent survey by SunGard Availability Services uncovered the following: Over 45% of IT decision-makers indicate they struggle to forecast and understand the costs associated with cloud migration. 40% of respondents cited they ‘lack understanding of cloud architecture ...

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Cloud Cost Optimization to Mitigate Inflation and Rising Operational Costs

There is a perfect economic storm brewing right now making it unlikely that cloud hyper-scalers like AWS, GCP and Microsoft will continue systematically lowering prices anytime soon. As inflation rises faster than it has since the late 1980s, the cost of doing business for these providers is going up, especially impacted by: High energy costs Increased cost of capital Supply chain issues (like semiconductors for example) Build and operating costs for new data centers If this period of inflation and low growth continues, it would potentially interrupt the declining price trends in cloud computing services. In the worst-case scenario, it could ...

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12 for '21 Cloud Optimization Series: Number 11 - Storage Management

Cloud spend is anticipated to continue its massive growth trajectory for the foreseeable future. However, the spend does not have to match that same growth curve! To help our Clients maintain sound Cloud Optimization programs, we've assembled a series of articles and tips called: 12 for '21 Cloud Optimization Series (note: request a download of all 21 here). Today we review the fourth installment in the series: Set Up Hierarchical Storage Management. Data sets have specific lifecycles. Early on, your workload might often access the data. But overtime, data access, in particular the aging one, drops drastically. Some data remains idle in the ...

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12 for ‘21 Cloud Optimization Series - Number Ten: Reserve Your Instance

Cloud spend is anticipated to continue its massive growth trajectory for the foreseeable future. However, the spend does not have to match that same growth curve! To help our Clients maintain sound Cloud Optimization programs, we've assembled a series of articles and tips called: 12 for '21 Cloud Optimization Series (note: request a download of all 21 here). Today we review the fourth installment in the series: Reserve Your Instance In exchange for an upfront commitment of 1 or 3 years, AWS (“ Reserved instances”), Microsoft Azure (‘Reserved Savings’) and GCP (‘Commitment Price’] offer significant cost savings (anywhere from ~29% up to 72%) ...

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12 for ‘21 Cloud Optimization Series - Number 9: Storage Classes

Cloud spend is anticipated to continue its massive growth trajectory for the foreseeable future. However, the spend does not have to match that same growth curve! To help our Clients maintain sound Cloud Optimization programs, we've assembled a series of articles and tips called: 12 for '21 Cloud Optimization Series (note: request a download of all 12 here). AWS, Azure and GCP offer data storage services that include a range of options in term of cost and performance. You can choose from several different storage classes (and pricing) depending on how frequently the data will be accessed, how long you need to store the data, and the ...

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Negotiating Cloud Infrastructure Agreements

Philippe Anav
Sep. 17,2021 |

While the scalability, flexibility and efficiency of cloud infrastructure yield undeniable benefits, there are some rather large pitfalls that must be avoided with Cloud Agreements. The complexity of dynamic consumption, broad range of providers’ features and its workload applicability, are challenges to recognize early on to capitalize on your cloud investments and avoid value leakage along the way. Generally, any and all of the scenarios below are encountered by our corporate clients during their cloud lifecycle: Early stage: You are at the start of your cloud adoption and unsure if an enterprise (or ‘ private pricing’) agreement is the ...

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Cloud Migration Lock-In: Risk to be Avoided

Supplier lock-in has been a major issue with savvy decision makers for many years, and with good reason. Allowing your company to be overly subjugated to a specific supplier (often with little control of the situation) often turns into a monopolistic relationship. The script gets flipped and rather than exercising your buyer power, you become the passive party, beholden to any changes in terms and conditions having little power to stop it. Unfortunately, with the exodus from data centers to the cloud, companies are now finding themselves being locked-in to AWS, Azure or Google with their increased need for cloud flexibility and scalability ...

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12 for '21 Cloud Optimization Series - Number Eight: Elastic IPs

Cloud spend is anticipated to continue its massive growth trajectory for the foreseeable future. However, the spend does not have to match that same growth curve! To help our Clients maintain sound Cloud Optimization programs, we've assembled a series of articles and tips called: 12 for '21 Cloud Optimization Series (note: request a download of all 12 here). Our eighth chapter in the series: Elastic IPs Elastic IPs (‘EIPs’) An Elastic IP is static and is assigned to a given instance regardless of the instance's state. The “elasticity” of the IP address enables you to stop EC2 instances and transfer the IP address to another EC2 instance—or ...

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12 for '21 Cloud Optimization Series - Number Seven: Spot Pricing

Cloud spend is anticipated to continue its massive growth trajectory for the foreseeable future. However, the spend does not have to match that same growth curve! To help our Clients maintain sound Cloud Optimization programs, we've assembled a series of articles and tips called: 12 for '21 Cloud Optimization Series (note: request a download of all 12 here). Our seventh chapter in the series: Use Spot Pricing Spot Instances are spare compute capacity at a steep discount (up to 90%) to On-Demand Instances. Spot Instances can go down with very little notice. While they are frequently used to supplement On-Demand Instances, they aren’t meant to ...

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12 for '21 Cloud Optimization Series - Number Six: CloudWatch with Autoscaling

Cloud spend is anticipated to continue its massive growth trajectory for the foreseeable future. However, the spend does not have to match that same growth curve! To help our Clients maintain sound Cloud Optimization programs, we've assembled a series of articles and tips called: 12 for '21 Cloud Optimization Series (note: request a download of all 12 here). Our sixth chapter in the series: CloudWatch with Autoscaling AWS CloudWatch (Azure Monitor, GCP Monitoring) enables you to collect consumption metrics and set up alarms to invoke actions. These tools collect these metrics, allows you to visualize them and to define alarms with the ...

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