Cloud adoption rate is at all time high right now. Irrespective of sizes and industry, enterprises are embracing cloud based technology for leveraging business by adding dimensions of flexibility, portability and agility to it at reduced cost of IT.
Cloud now offers commercial solutions for data storage, developments and testing without additional costs of hardware and infrastructural modernization. It has liberated organizations from expensive licensed software, hosted in internal servers. With as a service solutions hardware and infrastructural expenses are born by the service provider, who is also responsible for upgrading the levels of available services in a timely manner for the benefits of users. Cloud is also flexible, which means that the capacity can be increased or decreased as required. So, adding new users is relatively easy for hosted services. Further, cloud services are accessible from any part of the world – a desirable advantage for modern global organizations. Nonetheless, it can also prove expensive if its usage isn’t monitored the right way.
Your cloud performance will be measured on two parameters:
- Return on Investment (ROI): It is based on up-front calculation of business needs, organizational maturity, data control requirements, regulatory considerations and measurements of benefits against costs associated.
- Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): It measures the direct and indirect costs associated with cloud adoption. It helps determining your cloud performance.
The costs of cloud adoption can increase by leaps and bounds if not monitored the right way. The complexities of services offered and multi-vendor situation often make it difficult to measure cloud usage of an organization. Moreover, many organizations aren’t sure of how to optimize their cloud capacity.
If you are planning to adopt visualization in your organization you’d need a clear cloud strategy. Your success will depend upon successful determination of your current requirements and successful prediction of your future needs. Here is how it can be done.
Capacity planning: Cloud capacity is elastic but it is also its biggest challenge. Organizations often get carried away by the hype and pile on their current capacity without much thought. Cloud capacity management is therefore most crucial than ever if you want to enjoy the real benefits of cloud computing.
Plan ahead: Cloud based service providers maintain ‘over-provisioning’ to support burst of extra resource and that can cost you high. So, you’d need to plan ahead of your requirements and made adequate provisions for that beforehand to minimize such sudden bursts in demand.
Predict future requirements: It is as essential as determining your current requirements. One of the most crucial parameter of cloud adoption is to build a flexible IT environment that can adjust with your growing future needs. Determine your cloud requirements based on your future business plans.
Cloud is so vast and complex that it is easy to lose your ways in cloud. Further, the ideas surrounding it aren’t always clear. As a result, determining your cloud usage would need more professional approach. Capacity management and capacity planning are the two most crucial determinants of economical success your cloud adoption. Make sure that you receive what you have been promised by your cloud based service provider. You would need an IT framework for managing your services and to facilitate smooth transition of service and data from one supplier to another as needed.
Author Bio: Charles Smith is associated with the IT industry for over a decade now. He is a senior consultant with a California based company that offers cloud computing solutions to companies across industries. Charles has vast experience in implementing cloud computing projects and offering consultation to companies in mapping their ways in cloud environment. He has worked long in designing enterprise cloud based applications.