In today's fast-paced digital landscape, the cloud has emerged as a game-changer thanks to its ability to offer flexibility, scalability, and efficiency to businesses of all shapes and sizes. Many organisations have already embraced the digital transformation journey and migrated to the cloud. However, the journey shouldn’t stop there.

Once you've successfully migrated to the cloud, you enter a new phase of challenges and opportunities — shifting your focus to cloud optimisation. You see, to truly reap the benefits of the cloud, you’ve got to have a strategy, remain vigilant, and develop an eye for potential pitfalls. After all, failing to navigate this post-migration phase can lead to growing costs and missed opportunities. 

In this article, we will delve into the key considerations that should demand your attention post-migration. By understanding and preparing for these potential challenges, you can ensure that your cloud journey continues to be rewarding and doesn't lead to wasteful expenditure or stagnation.

Having established why optimising your cloud strategy is important, it’s worth uncovering the tell-tale signs that indicate you need to rethink your current approaches. In essence, how do you know when it’s time to double down on cloud optimisation?

Spiralling costs

Higher than expected costs are a clear indication that your cloud setup may not be fully optimised. In fact, most companies place cost reduction as a top goal when working on cloud optimisation initiatives. According to G2, ‘61% of organisations plan to optimise existing use of the cloud for cost savings, making it the top initiative for the fifth year in a row’.

So, why do spiralling costs occur? There are a couple of contributing factors we, at Zühlke, have identified as most common:

• Cost underestimation: inability to model costs accurately and account for ‘what if’ scenarios at the migration stage.
• Egress charges: unforeseen or unexpected network egress charges.
• Duplicated licensing costs: additional costs for software licensing in migration and parallel run scenarios.
• Lack of right-sizing: like-for-like sizing of compute and storage without considering the benefits of cloud elasticity and cost models.
• Limited use of cloud-native: inability to benefit from autoscaling due to app vendor support or prohibitive software licensing costs.

Technical debt

Technical debt is a major driver of cloud optimisation initiatives. As we mentioned above, sometimes you have no choice but to opt for a lift and shift approach, simply moving your technical debt into the cloud and hampering future velocity. 

As a result, you’ll still rely on legacy tools and provisioning techniques. You won’t be able to realise the full cost benefits of autoscaling, CI/CD, environment tear down, and sustainability. Plus, it’ll very likely complicate your networking in hybrid and multi-cloud scenarios, add egress charges, and contribute negatively to latency and the user experience.

In short, if you’ve got a lot of technical debt following on-premises to cloud migration, it’s time to optimise your cloud infrastructure.

Cloud sprawl

This challenge is particularly prevalent in organisations that pursue multi-cloud strategies. Cloud sprawl occurs when a company doesn’t manage or monitor its cloud environment effectively, allowing cloud instances, services, and providers to proliferate across the organisation without much oversight. This not only creates a messy IT architecture but also increases costs through unused cloud instances and a need for a vast array of technical skills to manage it all.

Future cloud strategy and roadmap

Lastly, if your cloud strategy only encompassed the journey towards migration, it’s time to take it a step further. Once you’ve transitioned to the cloud, the work must not stop and you need to be looking beyond migration.

At Zühlke, we have five key recommendations when it comes to your cloud optimisation strategy:

1. Avoid lift and shift and embrace cloud-native. Of course, there are legitimate use cases for using the lift and shift approach. For example, when you want to avoid another physical data centre move, need to transition quickly in a stressed exit scenario, want to avoid incurring financial penalties for a delayed exit or contingency extension, or if you’ve got stubborn legacy workloads. However, whenever possible, it’s best to avoid the lift and shift method. After all, you won’t always reduce costs with it. So, embrace cloud-native strategies where it’s financially, operationally, and architecturally viable.
2. Model your cloud costs and run ‘what if’ scenarios. Preparation is key and running the numbers on your potential costs can save you time and money in the long run.
3. Review the tactical decisions. Carefully consider any tactical decisions you’ve made during migration, they may come back to bite you.
4. Anticipate unexpected events. Don’t go at it alone. Avert the impact of unforeseen situations by partnering with experienced cloud specialists.
5. Don’t rush to multi-cloud. Employing a multi-cloud approach has the potential to increase your costs, complexity, and challenges. Therefore, it’s advisable not to prioritise this strategy too early.