Does this sound familiar? “You will move to the cloud, for right or wrong, because of a business imperative to get out of your data center, not tomorrow, but yesterday.” Or, “You’re sold on the idea that by migrating to the cloud, you’d be able to reduce your total cost of ownership (TCO), increase flexibility, and accelerate innovation projects.” The cloud practically sells itself, and as a result, you plan to ditch your legacy, on-premises technology and begin your cloud migration journey.
However, suppose you hop into the cloud without a defined strategy and approach. In that case, you’ll experience cloud sprawl, and spiraling cloud costs will negate the touted benefits of the cloud. This sort of “blind faith” in all the cloud offers is a common mistake many business leaders make. It has prevented you from considering cloud management and economics as part of your cloud migration strategy.
Without cloud cost governance, your organization will suffer O2: Overprovisioning and Overspending. You’re left confused because this is the exact opposite result you thought cloud migration would have. Additionally, if you find yourself in this predicament, you have difficulty pinpointing areas for improvement to initiate corrective action.
Enter Innovation Scoring by 2nd Watch. Our data-driven scoring system will help you assess your applications running in the cloud environment and identify where you are overprovisioning and overspending. Innovation Scoring is the first step to establishing cloud economics and maximizing the value of cloud computing to your business in the long run.
The Importance of Cloud Economics
If O2 is how you define your cloud environment, you’ve learned the hard way about the need for cloud economics. While cost savings is a component of cloud economics, the ultimate goal of the practice is to maximize the value of cloud computing for your organization. Implementing cloud economics will give your business insights into which departments are utilizing the cloud, what applications and workloads are using the cloud, and how these moving parts contribute to more impactful and cost effective business goals.
Without cloud economics, your business will deal with overrun cloud budgets, which are usually due to one or more of the following:
- Ungoverned costs: your organization has no idea what it is spending on.
- Unforecasted usage: you see more cloud projects than you had anticipated.
- Uncommitted mindset: you don’t want to commit to a cloud contract (because you can’t predict its usage), so you miss out on contractual discounts.
- Wasted dev/test resources: your dev team is overprovisioning their infrastructure.
- Overestimated production headroom: you are not auto-scaling or have not set proper parameters for autoscaling for your applications.
- Wrongsized production: your production environment is overprovisioned, and pay for the excess resources monthly.
- Poor design and implementation: your architects make suboptimal design choices for cloud solutions because they are unaware of the costs to the business.
For cloud economics to work, there must be a company-wide commitment to the practice beyond simply calculating cloud costs. Just like implementing a DevOps practice, impactful cloud economics requires promoting a cross-functional and collaborative culture. Business leaders must encourage transparency and trackability to enable teams to work together harmoniously to manage their cloud infrastructure and prove the true business benefits of the cloud.
2nd Watch’s Innovation Scoring
Cloud economics is critical for your business to reap the maximum benefits of cloud computing. However, cloud economics is a pervasive cultural practice, so it won’t happen at the snap of your fingers. It will require time and effort for your business to establish cloud economics.
The first step in controlling your cloud budget and governing your cloud platform is to identify areas of improvement. 2nd Watch created the Innovation Scoring system, our proprietary scoring methodology, to help you identify opportunities for optimization and modernization in a data-driven way.
Our Innovation Scoring methodology will reveal the underlying problem with your cloud management. We’ll be able to identify the application needing improvement and determine why it is suboptimal. Did you set it up incorrectly and need to move to PaaS with autoscaling capabilities? Or did someone write your application in 2005, and you are in dire need of application modernization? Or is it a combination of both? 2nd Watch designed its Innovation Scoring to pinpoint areas for improvement in your database, infrastructure, and/or application. When we ascertain the source of inefficiency, we can address issues contributing to cloud sprawl and skyrocketing cloud costs.
To calculate your Innovation Score, we analyze several different dynamics related to your cloud applications. The ratings from each category are then cross-tabulated to generate a total view of your entire cloud environment. Your Innovation Score will not only reveal inefficiencies but also allow us to compare your efforts against other similarly sized companies and make sure you are up to industry standards.
2nd Watch understands that cloud economics is a cultural undertaking; therefore, when we assign Innovation Scores to our clients, we do so in a way that encourages company-wide participation. To promote engagement and commitment, we’ve gamified our Innovation Scoring: we split our clients’ technical leadership into teams and calculate each team’s score. When we check in with our clients, we reveal each team’s score to showcase which ones are being innovative and taking advantage of the cloud and which ones have room for improvement.
Sample Innovation Scoring Output
Our approach to Innovation Scoring promotes friendly competition, which fosters collaboration between teams and a transparent high-level overview of how each team is leveraging the cloud. When our clients are a part of our Innovation Scoring system, it jumpstarts a culture of innovation, transparency, and accountability within their business.
Conclusion
Consider the importance of cloud economics when planning to run your applications in a cloud environment. It is easy to overspend, get overwhelmed, and have no sense of direction. Therefore, cloud economics is beneficial whether you implement it proactively or reactively.
2nd Watch’s Innovation Scoring is a practical first step to getting your cloud budget in order and establishing cloud economics as a standard cultural practice in your organization. Through data and analysis, our Innovation Scoring will help you identify how you can optimize your cloud instance so that you are receiving maximum cloud value for your business. Moreover, Innovation Scoring trains your teams to be communicative and cross-collaborative, which are the traits your company culture needs to succeed in cloud economics.
2nd Watch takes a holistic approach to cloud cost optimization and cloud economics. Contact us, and we’ll show you where and how you can improve your cloud-based applications with our Innovation Scoring.
