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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Like a party no one wanted to go to, the COVID pandemic dragged many IT Executives into (over) spending on technology that was not planned for. In the frenetic pace to ‘keep the lights on’, expenditures were made without the scrutiny they may have normally received pre-COVID. Supporting all the work from anywhere (WFA) initiatives including conferencing, PCs, and remote access software and hardware were all added to the mission critical initiatives already underway, like digital transformation and cloud migrations siphoning money away from those other priorities. As you start planning for your 2022 budgets, you may just now be realizing and ...
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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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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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Microsoft has a long history of confusing customers with multiple pricing models and several different agreement types. With Cloud services, some of that has been simplified on the surface, but still leaves customers typically paying more (not less) over time. Microsoft really is not in business to help their customers spend less on Microsoft, but we are. In that spirit, as many of you already know, Microsoft announced new global price increases set to go into effect March 1, 2022. In addition to the 365 increases, there are other important changes coming to their CSP (Cloud Solution Provider) partner programs that could also impact your ...
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Every IT leader reading this now is overspending 30% to 60% on at least one of their strategic suppliers. Unfortunately, many are overspending on several. How can we know this with such confidence? We’ve been seeing it now since 2002 and it’s the very reason we are thriving today. There are several factors that enable this culture of overspend to get traction inside organizations. Much of it is built on the good intentions of IT buyers simply working to execute their business plans with limited resources. Exacerbating the problem however, are the technology goliaths and their downstream ecosystems, who spend vast sums of money to ensure ...
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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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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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The news is rife lately with security breaches and ransomware attacks. The U.S. company Colonial Pipeline was among one of the high profile cases given the impact on business and consumers across the country. There have been several others such as JBS USA food processor, Ireland’s HSE (Health Service Executive) which manages health care system, Acer and many, many more. As an NBC news item recently put it, Cyber Security staff are barely hanging on and not able to keep up with the barrage of attacks. Its clear that for the short term, the opportunities for criminals to make vast sums of money are simply too good to resist and will likely ...
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Oracle Rewards! Oracle recently launched a new program selling ocean-front property in Arkansas. Bonus! North of the Arctic Circle in Alaska, they also have land available for purchase. Rewards and Credits! The deal is that for every acre you buy in Alaska, you get a credit toward your Arkansas property! Sounds like a good deal, right? Except however, when you fully understand that Arkansas is not on the ocean, and you have zero need for land in Alaska (no offense meant to Alaskans). Yes, they are not really selling land, but in classic Oracle fashion, they have put together a ‘rewards’ program that purports to lower your support costs but ...
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