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12 for '21 Cloud Optimization Series - Number Four: Power-Cycle It

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: Power-Cycle It. A large portion of the cloud waste originates from idle and low utilization instances. This is particularly relevant for non-production (e.g. development, testing, QA, etc.) instances and applications with consumption ...

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Top 10 HCM HRMS Suppliers for 2021

Introduction: The WFA (Work from Anywhere) dynamic has challenged the traditional mission of HCM professionals. With these changes come new and unique ways that HCM and HRMS providers should be engaged and negotiated with. As you read through our top 10 providers, some strategic imperatives to keep in mind: Innovation: Shifts to WFA models require rapid, nimble, innovation focused providers. Keep this in mind when researching your renewal and or new agreements. Ensure the agreement’s terms and conditions meet YOUR expectations and projected business requirements – not the providers sales and margin goals. Return of the niche providers: HCM ...

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When Migrating Oracle Workloads to AWS or Oracle Cloud, Size Matters

Matt Ryan
Apr. 29,2021 | Oracle Cloud Amazon AWS CCO

While recent articles proclaim Oracle is ‘Turning into a Cloud Giant’ and why their stock is should be considered a ‘buy’ (Barron’s, Feb 19th, 2021) – we say, “really?” While NET(net) does not pretend to be in the stock price benchmarking business, we can say based on experience that if Oracle is indeed becoming a ‘Cloud Giant’, then it’s probably bad for their customers. Historically, Oracle has grown new lines of business by pressuring customers into purchases they really don’t want or quite yet need but are left with few choices lest they become another audit victim. Consistent with that strategy, Oracle has thrown up some daunting ...

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12 for '21 Cloud Optimization Series - Number Three: Demand 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 third installment in the series: Demand Management. It is critical that workloads and their consumption profile match with the appropriate cloud infrastructure. Most of the cloud waste originates from a lack of consistent, dynamic governance. With few clicks, any ...

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12 for '21 Cloud Optimization Series - Number Two: Consolidate

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 second installment in the series: Consolidation. Consolidating under-utilized and over-utilized instances out of your fleet can be a quick start on the path of cost savings. By leveraging native analytics, you can generate recommendations toward consolidation (e.g. ...

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AWS Market Update and 2021 Market Forecast

Cloud is an integral part of almost every company's strategic technology portfolio. As legacy migrations continue and cloud spend increases across every industry, its never been more critical to understand both your specific cloud investments, and the suppliers (AWS) that drive them. Only those that fully understand these market dynamics will enjoy the competitive advantage that comes with informed insight. Conversely, those who fail to comprehend their waste, overspend and the market dynamics behind it, are doomed to escalating spend, blown budgets, and lagging transformation efforts. Below we give you that market insight, updates on AWS as ...

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Time to Extract Value from VMware

Michael Welsh
Feb. 11,2021 | Cloud VMware

Since 2002, we have been helping clients optimize technology spend and have maintained a continuously updated list of suppliers where we know we can extract value with a high yield. VMware has been and seems destined to remain at or near the top of this list for the foreseeable future. VMware is credited with commercializing compute virtualization technologies with their popular vSphere product, enabling multiple virtual applications to run concurrently on a single physical host. This increased utilization of IT resources has dramatically improved the economics of enterprise datacenter infrastructure, vaulting VMware to a market dominant ...

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12 for '21 Cloud Optimization Series - Number One: Shut it Down

Shut it off. Simple right? Sounds like something you might say to your children whenever they leave the light on in a room. But like any endeavor, shutting off instances in the cloud does take some amount of wherewithal and effort. Begin by identifying idle and under-utilized instances out of your fleet. By leveraging native analytics (e.g. AWS Trusted Advisor, AWS CloudWatch, Azure Advisor, Google Compute Engine), you can generate a list of these instances across regions and workloads. After a quick audit with your technology team or application owners, you can take a step toward savings realization by: Terminating/deleting idle instances ...

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AWS Outage: Plan Ahead to Avoid Future Catastrophe

AWS experienced a significant outage on November 21st, 2020 that impacted customers located in one (US-East-1) of AWS’ 23 geographic regions. The region was significant however, given the number of companies that publicly stated their issues via social media channels: Coinbase Glassdoor iRobot – impacted home app which, according to LinkedIn security employee, effected his ability to vacuum home Roku Vonage The Washington Post Ring doorbells started not working And more… According to a report by ZDnet, AWS attributed the outage “to errors with its Kinesis data-streaming service. While many of the impacted services don't use AWS Kinesis, ...

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Cloud Benefits: Diminished or Eliminated Without Governance

In the ‘race to the cloud’, many organizations are not realizing the promised cost benefits of moving to their infrastructure to the cloud. In fact, many are finding that they are spending far more than they anticipated. While Organizations should save 15% or more by moving to the cloud infrastructure, a 2020 report[1] shows that realizing these savings is not straightforward: 80% of organizations will overshoot their cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) budgets, due to a lack of cost optimization approaches. 45% of organizations that perform lift-and-shift to cloud Infrastructure, without optimization analysis, will overprovision up to ...

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