Is Your Hybrid Cloud Out of Control? Call Your Local MSP!

Do you remember when you first heard of “the cloud”? Perhaps you saw a slickly-produced TV commercial presenting the cloud as a ubiquitous and virtually unlimited source of inexpensive server capacity accessible from anywhere at any time. Everyone in the commercial was most likely happy and content, almost thrilled by the cloud and what it did for them.?

And yet those commercials provided very little detail on what the cloud was used for or even what it was. But they were compelling and well-made and somehow you just knew that you needed the cloud even if you were fuzzy on the what and why.??

In those bygone days, the cloud became aspirational, even though few could actually define it. Technology vendors took note and jumped on the hype train, pulling out all the stops to associate their products with the cloud, even if they had little or no relation to it at all.?

The Cloud goes from conceptual to actual??

Before long, the cloud transitioned from primarily a marketing term or concept to a reality, and with good reason. In comparison to purchasing, configuring, and maintaining on-prem servers, cloud computing was simpler, cheaper and more flexible.?

With the introduction of commercial clouds from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, along with a handful of smaller players like IBM, Oracle and Alibaba, the cloud came into its own. Thousands of companies joined the movement and migrated the bulk of their applications to the cloud. For many, computing was more manageable and cost-effective than ever before.?

But then things got complex – and expensive??

Perhaps it was too much of a good thing, but today more than half of all businesses are running multiple cloud instances, often with multiple vendors. In fact, more than 40 percent of companies use three or more different clouds. Inherently, these hybrid, multi-cloud infrastructures are much more difficult to manage than single cloud systems.?

Cloud pricing can escalate quickly, leading to costs that can spiral unexpectedly when changes are made to configurations, throughput or storage. Managing the costs for even a single instance on a single cloud can be tricky due to sometimes opaque or confusing pricing thresholds. Minor a adjustment can cause a nasty and unexpected price bump.??

As hybrid/multi-cloud infrastructures become increasingly more complex, it only becomes more difficult for companies to get a comprehensive view of cost and utilization across their cloud-based enterprises. Automated monitoring and logging of cost and utilization levels can be lacking, so manual checks are required. As a result, many companies are simply not tracking these key metrics with enough frequency to keep spiraling costs in check.?

More than 80 percent of companies know they are constantly over or under provisioning to accommodate their workloads. And almost half of companies fail to stay optimized or rightsized on an ongoing basis. The situation promises to get worse as companies continue to migrate more and more of their workloads to the cloud.?

Cloud costs are eating up IT budgets?

Cloud computing costs are rising sharply and consuming an ever-growing share of IT budgets. The reasons are many, including higher prices charged by cloud vendors and the need for more cloud capacity as additional workloads are migrated to the cloud.??

Without proper oversight and monitoring, monthly billing surprises can easily occur. In many cases, these surprises are caused by developers that may pay little attention to pricing as they provision more capacity. And that is often due to a lack of resources – there simply aren’t enough in-house IT resources to design, manage and monitor increasingly complicated infrastructures.?

If this sounds like you, consider enlisting an MSP?

An expert MSP can rein in a poorly designed and managed cloud infrastructure. Through automation, expertise and diligent monitoring, an MSP can reconfigure your environment to increase efficiency and cut costs.??

It’s not at all uncommon for cloud infrastructures to incrementally gain more cloud vendors and instances and thereby become more costly and unmanageable over time. People are busy, stuff happens and before you know it, you’ve got a costly mess of an infrastructure on your hands. Enlisting an MSP is fastest way to clean that up, and pays for itself through dramatic cost savings, often immediately or close to it.?

K3 can get your multi-cloud environment under control, and keep it that way?

At K3 Technologies, we have extensive experience in managing complex cloud environments and can help you get a handle on yours.? What’s more, we can automate your cloud management and cost control processes, while providing ongoing management resources to leverage and extend scarce IT resources. To find out how, contact us at K3 Technology.?