Deciding what to migrate, what to modernize, and what to retain on-premises is part of enterprise IT infrastructure management. When a refresh cycle is up in your data center, there are two very different types of competing motions you need to evaluate. While they may appear to be independent, they’re also kind of not, so it can be tricky to decide which one to execute—or even to execute both—and to do so smoothly.

The first migration motion is the routine refresh cycle—the process of evaluating your data center’s hardware and software as they depreciate over time. There are a lot of considerations to weigh that will affect selection and timing. Are new models available that are faster and/or can save you money—many hardware vendors heavily promote refresh cycles to sell new hardware with faster processors and new features—or can you defer replacement and extend the life of existing equipment? Do you need more capacity or can you minimize the refresh and still maintain current SLAs? Refresh cycles are part of the natural evolution of your data center.

The second migration motion is related to digital transformation. This is about leveraging technologies to create new business value or opportunities. It requires changes that are more revolutionary in nature and therefore alter the landscape of your hybrid infrastructure. This includes moving to cloud or other modern architectures to enable new types of applications (transform business offerings), transition from capex to opex (transform your cost structures), take advantage of hyperscalers (transform the customer experience), and more. Digital transformation requires you to answer a completely different set of questions than those posed during a refresh. What’s the best cloud migration option to use? Are there any applications or workloads that should not be migrated? What are the cost and performance implications of the change? Are there data sovereignty issues that you need to consider? And many more.

Take advantage of refresh cycle inflection points to drive transformation

Refresh time is an optimal point to evaluate your migration options. You can migrate to:

• Nothing (defer)
• New hardware (refresh)
• Public cloud
• Private cloud or colocation

So, how do you decide whether to stay in the data center (defer or refresh) or go to a cloud environment? And if you choose to go, what exactly will that entail and how will you do it? These big decisions can have significant cost, performance, and risk consequences if you get them wrong. Virtana can help you get it right.

#KnowBeforeYouGo with Virtana

With Virtana, you can get all your most pressing data center migration questions answered, whether your targeted environment runs virtual machines, physical servers, or Kubernetes. Our #KnowBeforeYouGo engagement is a turnkey solution designed to quickly provide you with data science and data-driven crucial information to make sound decisions about your next move. The four-step process, which leverages Virtana’s Infrastructure Performance Management and Workload Placement technologies, includes:

• Discovery—The first step is to understand the state and rhythm of your data center. Deliverables include inventory; a health, utilization, and performance baseline assessment of the targeted environment; data cleansing; and application discovery leveraging lexical proximity and port signature recognition.
• Application dependency mapping and move groups—Once we know what you have, we build a picture of how it all works together. Deliverables include a detailed application dependency map and move group suggestions based on shared services and community detection.
• Cloud costing—We then identify the cloud configuration and cost for your targeted workloads. Deliverables include fit/unfit scorecard, time-series based rightsized configurations, and rightsized cloud costs for compute, storage disks, and egress traffic. The results are conveniently grouped by “as-is,” “peak values,” and 99^th and 95^th percentiles.
• Playback—Optionally, we can test it all before you make any commitments. Deliverables include validated fit/unfit scorecard, validated cloud configurations, and validated cloud costs.

Working with a partner?

We can collaborate with them—or we can provide a second opinion.

Need a partner to handle the end-to-end migration project and process?

We can recommend partners that we have worked with to jointly deliver successful discovery, migration, and evaluation projects. 

Already in the middle of a migration?

We can help you address the biggest concern that most organizations say they face, which is to help you decide where to place those workloads. The unfortunate reality is that 90% of migration projects experience some type of failure, and this uncertainty is a driving factor. Companies that work with Virtana to know before they go have a greater than 90% success rate.

Are you ready to #KnowBeforeYouGo?

If you have a refresh coming up and want to know what to do next with your applications and infrastructure, contact us.

The post Should I Stay or Should I Go? Get smarter about your refresh cycles appeared first on Virtana.

Enterprises are concerned about cloud costs

Controlling cloud spend is an issue that enterprises are concerned about. We asked about top challenges in managing hybrid/multi-cloud infrastructures, four of which are cost-related, including the top two issues cited. In fact, “keeping rising costs under control” was the number-two challenge, cited by 44% of respondents.

Every organization knows at a high level what it spends on the cloud—the monthly bills give you that top-line information as well as some additional breakdowns. But for most enterprises, this is insufficient. In fact, 73% of survey respondents said it’s important or very important to understand their cloud costs at a detailed level. And while 57% say they know exactly who is responsible for all of their cloud charges, that’s a significantly smaller group, indicating that enterprises don’t have all the cloud cost details they need to control their spend.

Organizations struggle to answer key cloud cost questions

Two-thirds of organizations track their cloud costs on a weekly or monthly basis. They’re fairly evenly split, with 33% reviewing those costs weekly while 34% do so monthly.

You might think organizations that need to understand their cloud costs in greater detail would track those costs more frequently, but this is not the case. In fact, respondents who said it’s not important to understand cloud costs at a detailed level are far more likely to track those costs daily—29% vs. 16%.

It’s also essential to understand who within the organization is tracking these costs. IT is carrying the cloud cost-tracking burden. While 89% of respondent organizations involve IT in the process, only 41% include finance/procurement. Given the size and variable nature of cloud spend, this is surprising.

The final question—in addition to who and when—is how organizations track their cloud costs. Most—76%—are using their monthly cloud bills. This is a good start, but as noted above, it is insufficient, especially if you want to understand your cloud costs in detail. The next most prevalent method, used by 57% of respondents, is to upload cost data spreadsheets to BI tools. This will undoubtedly give them the ability to analyze cloud cost data in various ways, but it can be a time-consuming effort.

There’s also the question of how to track costs across multiple CSPs. Multi-cloud is a reality for 83% of respondents, so this is a near-universal concern, but most organizations don’t have an efficient response. Almost one-third (29%) are consolidating the data manually, which may give them a full multi-cloud view into their costs, but it requires time and effort to get there. And more than half (56%) are simply tracking costs from each CSP separately, which makes it difficult to get a holistic view of cloud costs across the enterprise.

Given the variable nature of cloud costs, another important how question is: How do you find out about cost-impacting changes in utilization? The good news is that two-thirds of respondents (64%) get real-time alerts based on specified thresholds, which means they can act fast to prevent the accumulation of hefty charges.

While many of these approaches are highly reactive, that’s not necessarily a problem if they are simply one tool in a well-stocked cloud cost management toolbox. However, about one-third of respondents cited a single method employed to find utilization changes that affect cloud spend. And of this group, only 39% are using real-time alerts. This means that 61% of organizations in this cohort rely exclusively on just one after-the-fact method to learn about cost-impacting changes—and at that point, they may have racked up high costs that could have been avoided or at least contained.

Financial accountability structures are underdeveloped

FinOps is the practice of bringing financial accountability to the variable spend model of the cloud to enable all teams to make informed and appropriate business trade-offs between speed, cost, and quality. Less than one-quarter of respondents (24%) have a mature, effective FinOps practice in place, leaving 76% with incomplete, or even nonexistent, processes and controls to hold stakeholders throughout the organization accountable for cloud costs.

Does insufficient cost tracking hinder accountability? Or does a lack of accountability reduce the pressure to track costs in detail? The answer to this chicken-or-egg question almost doesn’t matter. The truth is, enterprises that want to control their cloud spend need both cloud cost tracking and cloud spend accountability.

Virtana enables detailed cloud cost tracking and accountability

Virtana Cloud Cost Management, part of the Virtana Platform, helps you demystify your cloud costs, enabling you to confidently manage your cloud expense to avoid end-of-month surprises. Real-time data collection and analytics allow you to analyze data easily across your hybrid cloud environments, even as conditions and options change. With deep insight into your spend across cloud providers and the ability to quickly customize reports to meet different functions’ and business units’ needs, you can keep all your stakeholders informed and accountable. Try Virtana Cloud Cost Management for yourself

Get the survey report: The State of Multi-Cloud Management

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The post Is Your Cloud Spend Problem a Cloud Cost Tracking and Accountability Problem? appeared first on Virtana.