Africa has an insatiable appetite for cloud computing. Demand for services on the continent is soaring, with annual growth rates of up to 30%, far exceeding the projected growth for Europe and North America. The technology has fundamentally changed how enterprise IT looks and works, how enterprises store and process their data, and the technical skill sets and knowledge they require to flourish in a digitally enabled economy.
With so much money going into infrastructure – Gartner predicts that worldwide IT spending will grow by more than 9% in 2025, with data centre systems accounting for a sizable chunk of that growth – to support ongoing trends such as artificial intelligence (AI) and increased business digitalisation, there is the ever-present risk that organisations lose control of the costs associated with being in the cloud. Several factors may lead to this, but what’s important is that with the right approach and platforms that facilitate cloud optimisation and monitoring, organisations can control their cloud spending while creating as much added value as possible.
When you lose control of the budget
An organisation overrunning its cloud budget is never the result of a single factor. Instead, it stems from several interlinking factors, ones that are not immediately solvable or remedied by quickly deploying a cloud cost management tool. Some of these factors include:
- Ungoverned spending: This one may be a bit obvious, but IT department leads not knowing where the money is going or the size of the cloud bills at the end of each month can be a driving factor in unnecessary and inflated expenditures.
- Unintended usage: It is possible for a business to be a victim of its own success. As organisations migrate more and more of their systems to the cloud and implement more projects, they can unintentionally exceed their initial budgets.
- A lack of commitment: Cloud service providers typically offer their customers discounts for a contracted amount of spending. Failing to predict how many instances to reverse or how much cloud they’ll be using, organisations can end up spending a lot more than they need to.
- Sizing up production: When it comes to the final stage in software development, organisations may oversize the production environment where they test and approve applications. That is not always a problem in the case of-premises infrastructure, but in the cloud, organisations end up wasting money on excess resources.
- Bad architecture: Suboptimal design choices or changes in application features, such as developers writing poorly performing code that consumes a lot of resources, can lead to wasteful expenditure.
Furthermore, overrun cloud spending can originate from a lack of proper communication between businesses and their cloud vendors. Failing to do so leads to vendors not having sight of their customers’ IT goals, while said customers lose sight of how their vendors are enabling their transformation.
Sweeping changes in your cloud approach
Businesses in East Africa may instinctively assume that slowing down cloud migrations and continuing to work within on-premises environments is the immediate solution to reigning in their cloud spend. The better path forward is to be strategic about what applications and systems they migrate. On-premises data centres have their own expenditures that can accumulate, and through targeted migrations, businesses can lower costs while continuing to experience growth.
That solution goes hand in hand with communication. Organisations should always evaluate their agreements with their cloud vendors, even when they’re not up for renewal. By doing so, they can keep track of their service parameters and work more closely with their vendors to achieve their cloud goals. This also lets organisations prevent any ‘unhealthy’ growth, such as provisioning more resources than necessary.
Optimise, monitor, and manage
The cloud isn’t going anywhere, so organisations have time to make changes incrementally while locking in value. They can release unused capacity, introduce auto-scaling features, and align service levels with the requirements of their individual applications. Once they have achieved those optimisations, they can set about implementing management solutions and increasing accountability.
As East African businesses open new cloud accounts, manage numerous clusters, and explore new projects, they need a mechanism to gather, filter and monitor the data that flows in from across their infrastructure. An insights cost management tool enables organisations to track their cloud spend, including ongoing expenses, which they can then compare with historical usage to help predict future unforeseen expenses. At the same time, these tools help centralise the organisation’s monitoring functions and limit access to cost data via identity and access management (IAM). In doing so, organisations track who oversees cloud spending and optimise that spending for whatever project or application they so choose.
Escalating cloud costs are an inevitable hurdle to overcome as more and more businesses migrate to public and hybrid environments. But it’s a hurdle that can be easily cleared with the right mindset and the use of platforms that enable the right level of insight and management.
By Christopher Saul, Territory Sales Lead for East Africa at Red Hat