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Managing Your Cloud Environment Post-Migration: “How can I keep delivering value?”

  • Posted by: Simon Croyden

If you’ve carefully worked through the questions discussed in earlier posts, your company should enjoy a smooth cloud migration. But once you’re successfully running in the cloud, it’s important to keep verifying that value is being delivered as you’re managing your cloud environment. This is mainly a question of revisiting questions 1 and 2 to check that you have what you need but no more, in order to manage your costs. But there are a few more things it’s advisable to do in order to make sure those costs stay low in the future.

Managing your cloud environment

Post-Migration Management Tips

  • Harness your performance tools and Asset Intelligence platform to verify that you have the right level of resources for your evolving needs. Ensure that users have the devices and services that they need, and remove or redeploy anything that is no longer required. As we mentioned earlier in this series, a Scalable study for a large US real estate company found that more than 40% of staff could be moved over to thinner clients and SaaS applications without detriment.
  • Check that you are not paying for more cloud resources than you really need – for example, is an application starting instances that are rarely used thereafter? The aim should be to match the performance baseline you captured from your on-premise solution and then gradually improve on it, while containing and, preferably, reducing costs.
  • Review your portfolio to make sure you have only the necessary applications and services. More opportunities for rationalization may come up in the future, for example as more SaaS alternatives to conventional apps become available. One area where this is happening rapidly is around financially connected systems and those containing personal data. During initial waves of SaaS adoption, there was no way that a business would risk HR or transactional data in the public cloud, but as confidence in the security models grows and the cost profiles are better understood, resistance wanes, and these applications are now being widely adopted.
  • Keep an eye on alternative cloud vendors and configurations to ensure that your chosen cloud solution is still the best and most cost-effective for your needs – and that evolving business needs, such as compliance with new information security requirements, are being met. If not, be assured that once you have migrated to the cloud, changing vendors is generally an easier process than the initial migration.
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