Cloud4C lays out the guidelines for cloud cost optimisation

There are three important areas that should be fixed to achieve this goal.

The move towards digital technology is fast becoming a necessity in many businesses today. At the forefront of this revolution is cloud computing technology, where users can utilise IT resources from the internet without the need for any installation or maintenance. This big shift from the way traditional businesses use these IT resources provides faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale; but the downside to all these benefits is the cost.

With the challenge of cloud cost management looming in businesses, how can companies drive better value from cloud technology without incurring excessive costs and losing control over its management?

Answering these important questions is Cloud4C, a CtrlS Group Company that offers high-availability services through its high-grade data centres, expertise on hyper scalers, and support for hybrid clouds.

Cloud4C gives businesses the strategy and roadmap to define, plan and implement logical steps on their cloud journey. They do this by examining the current and future states of a company’s business needs and IT infrastructure.

“Cloud4C is in the position to deliver much higher excellence that you can let go of the worries about what happens to your application, security, compliance, and your business continuity,” said Sridhar Pinnapureddy, Founder and CEO of Cloud4C & CtrlS.

“We give all of that as a bundled service and probably at a much lower cost compared to large companies.”

One of the company’s specialisations is creating strategies to optimise cloud costs that go beyond payment flexibility. How can a company dramatically reduce their IT expenses while matching IT workload demands effectively?

Cloud4C answers this question—and much more—as they shared some of their insights and expertise at the "Cloud Cost Management: Driving better value for your business applications" roundtable event held last 15 April 2021 at Marina Bay Sands.

Cloud4C's Vice President for Cloud Solutions Hitesh Bhardwaj drove home an important point when it came to cloud costs: Cloud cost optimisation is not a technical challenge; it's a governance challenge.

"Why is cost a challenge? IT decision-makers have been working with budgets for so long—and not just small budgets but significant portions. So why can't a new technology not help with the cost? One answer is that the cloud is breaking something fundamental in every business: and that is procurement. The moment you are introducing cloud, you are challenging and breaking the formal process of how your company or business has been procuring something related to IT,” he said.

According to Bhardwaj, when you put a cloud engineer in charge of a cloud initiative, he can accidentally affect your monthly budget unknowingly.

"The tech generation can create an idea from thin air, but what they're missing is governance. It's not intentional, but when they can get to the cloud, they have thousands of services that they want businesses to use without assessing the impact of cost."

"So as a parent, if you give a credit card to a younger generation and ask them to purchase for their games, for example, it's not surprising that by month-end you'd be having a bill shock isn't it?"

Solving the expense problem requires a decision-maker to challenge the status quo. Bhardwaj emphasized three important areas that must be fixed to optimise costs:

"The first is cost ownership. IT must know they'll be audited for what they're doing and should be held accountable to them. The second area that needs to be fixed is visibility—they should know which applications are being used," he explained.

Oftentimes, visibility is the biggest problem when it comes to managing cloud costs.

"Understanding the bill is a complex challenge. So not knowing where the cost is coming up is where the problem lies: visibility. You have to know what is causing that. There are ways to do this. The default bills that you get from providers are not designed for you—they are designed as an invoice for procurement with no questions asked—you just pay. You need to understand where the cloud cost is coming from,” he explained.

Cloud4C has created a universal cloud platform that’s specifically designed to solve this problem.

"By using that data, we have engineered the Universal Cloud Platform (UCP). We adjust data from the bills and get inside and ask what is causing that cost. And what is the predicted outcome? If it goes this way, what will the yield be and what will it look like? Is it aligned with the budgetary scale or not? If not, then there has to be an exercise done and that is the ‘surgery’ you have to do,” he said.

The third area that needs to be fixed is the budget's design.

"It's a technical configuration that says you are not allowed to spend that. You can get an alert that says you're out-running the budget," he explained.

Fixing these issues doesn’t come with a one-size-fits-all guarantee. It requires a shift in culture, a willingness to improve, accountability, and in some cases, the right partner 'that has got skin in the game' to help them optimise their costs.

"People are looking for cheap, fast and good, but if I can expand that, it's really about cost-effectiveness and flexibility," said Terrence Yong, Cloud4C's Board Member Chairman.

"To save cost you need to have scale. Fast, by being able to deliver and automating as much as possible using the latest technology. Good, if it’s fit for the purpose for your industry. It has to be customised and that means looking at service level agreements plus security."

Click here to see photo gallery.