Cloud has become a pervasive part of the digital transformation (DX) journey. It has changed the way business is done. However, despite the undeniable business benefits, rising public cloud costs have spurred organizations to find the right mix of cloud deployment models to rein in excessive spending, deliver outcomes based on unique business needs, and, more significantly, avoid cloud lock-in.
The numbers demonstrate how a public-only cloud strategy can sometimes be challenging. According to GartnerOpens a new window , organizations that lack cost optimization processes overspend by about 40% in the public cloud1, underscoring how ungoverned cloud environments can lead to significant cost overruns that can be a big upfront hit for companies of all sizes.
This begs the question: Renting IT infrastructure and cloud services can deliver the desired business results but will it generate cost savings? Cloud solutions have never been one-size-fits-all. Recent reports show growing confidence and a shift to the hybrid and multicloud approach to minimize cost inefficiencies. Research from Nutanix’s third global Enterprise Cloud Index survey suggests that hybrid cloud, combining the use of both public and private clouds, is the preferred IT infrastructure model for 86% of IT decision makers (ITDMs).2 Meanwhile, Flexera’s 2021 State of Cloud report spotlights organizations’ tight embrace of multicloud, with a staggering 92% of respondents surveyed boasting of a multicloud strategy.3
Another major reason for the uptick is that this strategy can pave the way for a more targeted use of compute and storage which acts as a catalyst for greater flexibility, agility and cost optimization. The Nutanix Cloud Usage Report 2021Opens a new window also highlights the top three cost-saving actions taken by public cloud users to control their cloud costs, including, but not limited to — VM rightsizing, datastore rightsizing and eliminating unused VMs or old snapshots.
When it comes to cloud transition, a key consideration should be a frictionless hybrid and multicloud platform that extends the cloud-like scaling capabilities across traditional infrastructure and provides a unified management experience and tooling across clouds continues to be a challenge for IT leaders looking for flexibility, simplicity and cost-efficiencies. A misguided hybrid multicloud strategy can result in cost escalations and derail business outcomes.
Hybrid Multicloud Platform: What It Truly Means
Before diving into how a hybrid multicloud strategy provides tremendous potential for cost savings, let’s unpack what this approach truly means to IT leaders. In a real-world scenario, when considering migrating applications off-premises, IT needs to factor in the cost of re-factoring the applications before moving them into a public cloud. For organizations with a growing hybrid, multi-cloud infrastructure footprint, a lack of a unified cloud platform can increase operational complexity, leaving staff to manage applications across multiple IT architectures.
To ease the transition, IT teams need an enterprise cloud platform that brings private and public clouds together and enables seamless mobility and interoperability between on-premises and cloud and vice-versa without the need to re-engineer applications.
Put simply — a solution that offers the best of both worlds.
A recent post explainsOpens a new window that a fast, flexible hybrid and multicloud solution provides a more cost-effective infrastructure and delivers on the promise of real ROI and total cost of ownership (TCO) like never before. A key reason why hybrid architecture is emerging as a logical option is owing to the vastly reduced migration time to cloud, being able to use the same operating model and security practices as on-premises, and not requiring additional IT staff or IT skill sets.
Driving Real Business Value Out of Hybrid & Multicloud Strategy
All organizations relentlessly seek strategies to accelerate business value and reduce costs. Optimizing cloud spending helps companies avoid unnecessary investments and leverage cost savings to pursue business growth goals.
Below are five ways organizations can unlock savings from a truly frictionless hybrid multicloud solutionOpens a new window :
1. Reduce micro-waste: Business needs keep evolving, and significant cost inefficiencies occur when an organization is unable to right-size in step with their dynamic compute and storage needs. By managing compute and storage capacity based on the current business requirements, IT can significantly improve cost savings. For example, in a cloud-native world users are typically constrained when it comes to sizing their cloud resources. Commonly known as t-shirt sizes, public cloud vendors like AWS offer their compute instances in Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large, etc. Users pick the closest match to what they actually need, but in most scenarios, they will be unable to find a compute instance that perfectly matches their virtual machine (VM) requirements. You may want a VM with 4vCPUs and 6GB of storage, but you may only find compute instances that offer 4vCPUs with 8GB of storage or 6vCPUs and 6GB of storage. In each case, you will be wasting a certain resource capacity. This is called micro-waste and can quickly add up to wasted cloud spend when considering the thousands of cloud resources your engineering teams work with daily.
An alternative is to consider bare-metal instances, which are also provided by the cloud vendor. Bare-metal servers pack in a much larger available resource pool, and, unlike the T-shirt sized instances, they can be configured based on user needs. For example, an AWS i3.metal bare-metal instance provides you 72vCPUs and 8 x 1.9 TB of NVMe SSD storage. Users can slice and dice that resource pool across their VMs however they want. You will need hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software installed on the bare-metal server to manage its resource pool but using bare-metal instances instead of the t-shirt sized instances can prove to be more cost-effective if you have a reasonably large workload capacity (typically a few dozen VMs or more). This combination of HCI software installed on bare-metal cloud servers can yield cost savings for large-sized workloads when compared with the wasted spend that accumulates due to micro-waste across the cloud-native t-shirt sized instances.
2. Efficiency & flexibility: In hybrid cloud environments, IT teams leveraging public clouds such as AWS may not run instances all the time. In fact, what’s needed is the ability to monitor resource usage in real-time and automation policies that spin up or shut down unused resources to capitalize on the pay-per-use model. Nutanix’s ability to centralize visibility into one management platform across multiple public clouds as well as on-prem data centers, along with automated cost-saving recommendations, allows cloud teams to easily act upon unused or underutilized compute instances, storage buckets, old snapshots, unused load balancers, etc. You can also send the bare-metal instances into a “hibernationOpens a new window †stage where your data is saved in an S3 bucket, and your HCI software along with bare-metal instances, are shut down when not needed. Easily bring them back up with one-click and Nutanix will automatically redeploy your VMs and populate the data from the S3 storage bucket as if you never left.
The ability to delete unused instances, rightsize underutilized instances, or hibernate bare-metal instances with a single click help cloud admins realize the true elasticity of hybrid cloud, gain complete control over storage and compute infrastructure and dramatically pare down costs
3. Use your investment across multiple clouds: The fact that IT can rapidly move data and applications between clouds without massive re-engineering with simple-to-use software signals a radical industry shift that can accelerate business value and innovation. This cuts down on deployment times, generates cost savings on resources, allowing organizations to use freed up resources and staff for other use cases.
For instance, some organizations leverage the same cloud investments for development and testing and bursting use cases when storage is not being used for disaster recovery. This makes the best use of their existing investments without them having to spend capital on data center investments for additional capacity, opening a way for building cost efficiencies. In addition, organizations can also realize indirect cost savings from license portability which allows IT to move licenses between on-premises and public cloud deployments, eliminating the need for additional overhead
4. Cost transparency and ease of management: Most organizations split their workloads between on-premises and public cloud but lack the tools to evaluate the costs associated with these environments – and, more importantly, feed that information for better business decisions. Previously, there have been too few tools available to help IT teams gain centralized cost visibility.
With a unified cloud management tool such as Nutanix BeamOpens a new window , IT teams can compare the cost of running applications in private versus public cloud and find the right solution. Further, IT departments can explore the automated chargeback and budgeting feature along with a pre-configured TCO model to get a clear picture of on-prem or cloud spend.
Additionally, IT teams looking for a consistent management and orchestration layer across hybrid ecosystems can gain cross-platform visibility with Nutanix Prism console. The dashboard provides a single unified management plane to IT teams who want to simplify administration, reporting, and intelligent automation.
5. Risk mitigation: Keeping the business operational in the case of a disaster or an interruption is top of mind for all technology leaders. Moving disaster recovery to the cloud provides organizations with a faster and more efficient way for data replication and recovery of critical systems without making a heavy investment in data centers. Forrester’s VP and Principal Analyst Dave Bartoletti estimatesOpens a new window that on-premises disaster recovery strategies are bound for the cloud with 20% of enterprises shifting DR operations to the public cloud in 2021.
Enterprises looking for ways to leverage public cloud for disaster recovery and business continuity can take advantage of “Elastic DR†which eliminates the need to maintain a full data center or the full compute and storage costs incurred by maintaining 1:1 parity for the disaster recovery site. In addition, IT can gain greater efficiencies by leveraging the hybrid architecture for cloud bursting when they experience an increase in demand for additional compute capacity during peak periods. This helps organizations to cut down on the costs of maintaining IT infrastructures for seasonal peaks.
Make a Business Impact With the Right Solution
One of the perceived benefits of hybrid multicloud strategy is cost savings. But from an IT standpoint, despite rapid innovation in the hybrid multicloud world, factors such as architectural complexity, lack of cross-platform visibility and operational silos can swell operational costs. Moving legacy applications and data to the cloud requires substantial IT expertise, technologies and resources. IT leaders must consider certain hard fiscal questions before investing in a hybrid multicloud solution. Only a solution that offers genuine cost savings coupled with a highly resilient architecture can deliver unparalleled business value.
When weighing the costs and benefits of hybrid multicloud use cases, a 2021 IDC whitepaper illustrates why Nutanix has emerged as the go-to solution for key use cases such as cloud bursting, elastic disaster recovery, data center consolidation, and development and testing.
The whitepaper, Workload & TCO Considerations When Choosing Between Public, Private & Hybrid Cloud, which analyses the five-year total cost of ownership (TCO) for private cloud, hybrid cloud, native public cloud, and 3-tier infrastructure found that the Nutanix-based hybrid cloud returned the lowest TCO results, just ahead of the Nutanix-based private cloud by 7.1%.4
Furthermore, “Leveraging Nutanix Clusters and public cloud resources allowed hybrid cloud solutions to consume only the resources required to run the variable workloads during the times when the applications were required (just 30% of the year).â€
Final Thoughts
As the era of hybrid multicloud takes hold across industries, IT leaders planning a move to the cloud must evaluate what technology best meets their business needs, economic interests and dramatically simplifies management.
Perhaps the most significant element to ensure the success of your hybrid multicloud strategy is predicated on the right choice of solution provider. It all comes down to choosing a proven enterprise cloud platform provider that supports today’s business needs, can scale to meet tomorrow’s goals, and enables cost savings at each step of the journey.
Your choice of enterprise cloud platform becomes central to this effort, and proven platforms such as Nutanix can take you there with the least amount of friction while delivering the quickest time-to-value for your business.
To find more about the fastest and most cost-effective path to hybrid multicloud, visit Hybrid Cloud SolutionsOpens a new window .
Sources:
1 Gartner Predicts 2018: The Cloud Platform Becomes the Expedited Path to Value
2Â Third Annual Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index, Nutanix
3 Cloud Computing Trends: 2021 State of the Cloud Report by Flexera
4 Workload & TCO Considerations when Choosing Between Public, Private & Hybrid Cloud, Nutanix, 2021