The quick guide to effective hybrid cloud management

Hybrid cloud infrastructure costs optimization is important for business strategy

Pawel Poplawski
Senior Project Manager at Capgemini Poland

IT infrastructure transition to the public cloud is now a dominant trend. While some companies may choose to keep their infrastructure in the private cloud, for security reasons or to comply with compliance regulations, they will undoubtedly make some environments publicly available in the future. This shift is occurring because public cloud servers are more scalable. They provide the flexibility that customers need, whereas private clouds are far less flexible.

How can you effectively support combined public and private cloud programs, hereafter referred to as hybrid infrastructure? I’ll try to take a closer look at hybrid infrastructure cost management and show what impact it has on the business and its bottom line. Read in Polish >>>

Why is cost management strategy important?

An effective hybrid infrastructure cost management strategy is extremely important to organizations because it ultimately brings greater reliability, flexibility, and innovation to their structures as part of a broader cloud deployment initiative. Before it happens, organizations need support in the area of analyzing current cloud environments, which broadens awareness of where systems optimization and cost reduction may occur. This includes implementing the use of tags and policies that align with business rules, with a focus on shutting down services or resources when availability is not required or using appropriately sized resources, which ultimately leads to greater cost optimization in the cloud.

For instance, Capgemini achieves this through services such as native Azure Advisor or services offered in a Software as a Service model that uses API requests and other integrated dashboarding tools to track cost optimization, ongoing usage costs, and activities related to managing underutilized resources. This enables customers to have a complete, comprehensive assessment of hybrid infrastructure costs so that their systems can be effectively optimized. It also allows them to create a strategy that ultimately reduces costs and efficiencies, and eliminates idle resources or resizes them to a more efficient size whenever necessary.

What does this look like in the real world?

We have numerous lessons learned from working with different clients. For example, for one of our clients – a beverage supplier – a monthly infrastructure cost was reduced by 7% in a very short period. The client was mainly using a platform (Capgemini Cloud Platform) to manage its extensive infrastructure and was also using a cloud-based cost management platform. This platform provided the client with a clear visualization and transparent insight into the range of services they used and the costs they incurred.

The collaboration also involved analyzing the cloud’s accounts. During this analysis, the expert showed disks and idle applications and virtual machines that increased the cost unnecessarily or needed to be optimized in size. As a result, an account that was costing between €60,000 and €70,000 per month was easily able to save €5,000 per month.

What is the new cost management model?

Managing hybrid costs is often a challenge for organizations that have not historically emphasized monitoring and optimizing cloud costs. However, the pandemic has changed this area as well. It has shown companies that they need to have a more flexible approach, hence many companies are now moving towards a more modern way of managing their infrastructure.

To successfully implement the new model, companies need an effective hybrid cost management system for which they can engage experts. Key areas of optimization can now be identified and cost reductions implemented quickly. And there are proven tools that offer customers the opportunity to save significant amounts of money, ensuring that they can not only make their organization more resilient to market shocks, more flexible but also more innovative. The journey towards implementing cloud solutions will mean less capital expenditure, and more savings achieved post-implementation.