Cloud computing has transformed the computing world over the past couple of decades. From a niche concept in the early days of the millennium, in the modern world, almost all organizations have adopted cloud computing for their data storage and processing needs. Today, more data than ever is stored in the cloud.
According to estimates, the world will store 200 zettabytes of data by 2025 — with half of that data stored in the cloud. But it isn’t necessarily cheap and effective. At least, not for those who don’t use tools like the Silk platform.
One of the big promises of cloud computing was that it would reduce costs, by allowing businesses and organizations to only pay for the storage and processing that they needed, while also lessening the requirements of on-premises equipment.
Despite this, many reports are finding the cloud more expensive than anticipated. According to research from Gartner, approximately 80% of organizations overshoot their budgets when it comes to cloud infrastructure. In other words, what they expect to be a cost-saving exercise turns out to be a lot more costly than they expected.
There are multiple reasons for this — including a failure to properly manage cost optimization. Legacy applications may not have been originally built for the cloud, meaning that enterprises must often carry out expensive rewrites or refactoring if they do not wish to suffer severely compromised performance.
In addition, there is often a skills gap when it comes to cloud migration, with a shortage of available professionals to ensure that the process is carried out smoothly.
More Expensive than People Expect
Research firm IDC suggests that spending on cloud services is likely to hit $500 billion globally by 2023, with some of those costs coming as an unwelcome surprise to businesses struggling to control spends.
Cloud data management is not always optimized, lacking in features like compression, deduplication (the elimination of duplicate or redundant information), and more. There may also be a lack of support for multi-cloud environments, while data sharing between applications can also be inefficient. The result is that costs may considerably overrun. A report by Capita said that 58% of organizations have reported migrating to the cloud as being more expensive than expected, with security challenges, cloud optimization, and more being some of the reasons. Only an estimated 5% of Capita respondents said that they had not suffered any challenges in their cloud migration strategy.
These stats are concerning, although the majority still believe that the cloud is a net positive, despite its challenges. Importantly, some of these issues can be addressed through employing and deploying the right technologies as part of your cloud migration strategy.
Use the Right Tools to your Advantage
Silk’s intelligent data management reduces redundancy and more efficiently utilizes cloud-based resources. This involves several steps which can drive down cost. For starters, by using tools like advanced compression and deduplication, Silk can help vastly reduce organizations’ data footprint. In real-world terms, that can mean savings of up to 75% in both organizations’ private and public cloud.
In addition, Silk’s symmetrical, active-active architecture can grant companies the flexibility they need to scale their infrastructure according to changing performance needs. This addresses one of the key benefits of cloud computing, which is to be able to provide a service that can scale depending on what is required of it.
Finally, Silk decouples data from the infrastructure that it is housed on. This allows for the autonomous and dynamic allocation of SPU and storage resources to wherever makes the most sense. It’s a flexibility that can help counter expensive, yet very inefficient, data silos associated with vendor lock-in. By making organizations’ data solutions cloud-agnostic, not only does the efficiency of cloud solutions get significantly greater, it does this without costs ramping up at uncontrollable levels.
Decoupling data from infrastructure not only reduces cost, but can also speed up how quickly products can be brought to market, improve innovation and productivity, and more.
There’s no getting around the fact that the cloud is the future. There’s also no arguing with the fact that, as currently deployed, the cloud can be the cause of some expensive headaches. Fortunately, the solutions are out there to help. By using intelligent data management and other smart tools, it’s possible to greatly improve the benefits you can gain from the cloud. And, most importantly, to do it without breaking the bank.