Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Minimizing costs, reducing risk, and maximizing business value—all at the same time—requires a delicate balancing act. It’s not a new challenge, nor is it unique to IT infrastructures. But when it comes to the cloud, especially in hybrid cloud scenarios, it requires you to understand the performance, risk/compliance, and cost impacts of your current resource allocations and then adjust to maintain the optimal decisions to meet your SLA and budget targets.

Cloud computing is a foundational platform for modern businesses, enabling digital transformation and supporting organizational agility. The benefits of putting applications in the cloud are well documented: flexibility, scalability, and reliability with a lower capex investment.

The Cloud Is a No-Brainer… Most companies by now have a “to the cloud” initiative that’s at one stage or another of maturity. It’s a great way to make better use of all your resources—people, time, and money. And it gives you more flexibility. You don’t have to size your entire application architecture for important but short-lived peaks, such as Black Friday for retailers or year-end ERP closing for large manufacturers, to name just a couple examples.

San Jose, CA, July 14, 2020 – Organizations that embrace hybrid cloud migration projects can yield a 145% return on investment within three years, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Virtana has revealed. The study, which reviewed customer projects completed in the last three years, found that a composite organization achieved benefits of $2 million by adopting planning and optimization platforms, such as as Virtana’s CloudWisdom and VirtualWisdom.

Survey respondents who continued their cloud journey experienced less IT performance issues—Virtana and Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) to present full survey findings during June 25th webinar

You’ve made promises to your customers and end users, quantifying them in SLAs (service-level agreements) to instill confidence that those commitments will be honored. SLAs give users peace of mind. But what about your peace of mind? How can you guarantee your hybrid infrastructure and applications are continuously meeting or exceeding those SLAs? I’m going to explore how to ensure SLAs are met to maintain productivity and protect revenue.

The blessing and curse of cloud computing is flexibility. Now more than ever, companies leveraging the cloud are being revered for their ability to scale up usage of critical applications remotely for employees working from home, while in the same breath lambasted as IT costs sky-rocket. And in the midst of soaring usage, capacity, and cost come budget-cuts to fend off any other necessary evils during this challenging time.

The pandemic has heightened IT leaders’ need for efficiency in managing what we’re seeing more and more as a hybrid cloud world. We recently polled IT leaders across the US and EMEA on their current challenges, changes, and goals around hybrid cloud deployments, infrastructure visibility, use of AI/ML, and more.

The traditional method of planning server, network, and storage capacity is to look at the usage peaks and then add a safety margin. Most cloud hosting is planned this way. The idea that you only pay for what you use is not based on actual usage, rather on the capacities you initially specify. Most cloud migrations involve a ‘lift and shift’ approach of moving an application to a different host with minimal maintenance.