Navigating 2023’s Cloud Spends

As technology expenses in the Asia Pacific region are expected to grow at 3.5 times the economy in 2023, enterprises are facing increasing pressure to maximize ROI while navigating a challenging macroeconomic outlook. The Asian Development Bank predicts increased inflationary pressures in Asia, with warnings of lowered growth and a third of the world expected to be in recession according to the International Monetary Fund. This puts IT decision-makers under more pressure than ever before to manage expenses effectively. 

Cloud costs are a key area of focus as cloud consumption continues to scale across the region, with some estimates indicating a year-on-year increase of around 30%. While cloud technology enables global operations and network capacity, rising cloud costs have led companies such as Netflix to seek ways to control these expenses. 

As traditional recession IT budget strategies are no longer effective in ensuring an organization’s long-term resilience and agility, the focus now is on strategic and sustainable growth by prioritizing high-impact digital business projects. However, organizations must also balance the competing priorities of managing costs while seeking a cloud platform with sophisticated edge computing capabilities that can support workloads and data interoperability.

CIO World Asia Spoke with Matthew Lynn, Director, Cloud Computing, APJ, Akamai Technologies on how IT decision makers can navigate rising cloud spends amid the challenging macroeconomic conditions today.

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Challenges IT decision makers face today with cloud spend

Indeed, let’s consider the significant impact of cloud adoption over the past decade or so. At its inception, there were numerous opportunities for CIOs to benefit from the cloud’s agility, speed, and ability to accelerate product development. Moreover, there seemed to be potential for cost savings, although these proved to be temporary in nature. 

As organizations continue to migrate more and increasingly complex applications to the cloud, the costs associated with these endeavors become more significant and challenging to manage. In fact, cloud costs are typically rising by an average of around 30%, with many organizations struggling to control these expenses. As such, getting a handle on the growing cloud costs has become increasingly crucial for CIOs.

Roles And Responsibilities When It Comes To Cloud Computing

When it comes to computing, there are two significant aspects to consider. The first is ensuring a sustainable architecture for cloud services to ensure the delivery of the best possible services to both internal and external stakeholders. This involves being able to provide the right products from the appropriate platform with the necessary characteristics. 

For instance, some applications may require high performance and responsiveness to cater to a global audience, while others may necessitate high compute and storage capacity with limited bandwidth and connectivity. As a result, choosing the right cloud platform and architecture is critical for delivering optimal outcomes. Cloud providers are now seeking the right cloud architects for their organizations based on the specific needs of their applications.

Key Consideration For Enterprises Maximizing/Investigating Their Cloud Spend

In the past, organizations could move to a single system relatively easily. However, over the last decade, there are now several technical considerations that need to be addressed. Transparency and accountability are crucial when delivering and accounting for these considerations. As a result, organizations must increasingly rely on cloud computing to ensure that they are delivering the appropriate location from the right infrastructure with the right characteristics to meet the needs of their customers.

Choosing A Cloud Solution For Optimal Workload 

To ensure optimal application delivery, it is crucial to understand the core needs of the applications within the portfolio and how they can be best supported. For instance, large machine learning or AI workloads may require a compute location that is close to the data, with large and cost-effective storage and compute capabilities. 

This is where edge computing architecture comes in, which is designed for distributed computing in various locations, particularly for applications that need to be delivered close to the user and require high responsiveness. Such workloads include API and consumer-based applications. Therefore, understanding the application architecture and its corresponding support needs is vital for delivering applications in the most appropriate way.

Rising Importance Of Developer Experience In Cloud Solution Selection

Ensuring that developers have a solid foundation to work on and can efficiently deliver their applications is becoming increasingly important for organizations. As a result, many organizations are making decisions on the tool set to use. It is also crucial to understand that multi-cloud environments are here to stay, and organizations need to be “cloud smart” to ensure that the right workload is delivered from the appropriate infrastructure. 

To achieve this, organizations must have processes and open-source tools in place that enable them to deliver workloads across multiple cloud providers effectively. Going forward, there will be an increase in cloud-native tool sets and open-source tools that can facilitate the efficient deployment of workloads across multiple cloud providers, and this is the key to success.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the challenges of managing cloud spend continue to grow for IT decision makers. As organizations continue to migrate more applications to the cloud, costs associated with these endeavors become more significant and challenging to manage. Choosing the right cloud platform and architecture, as well as understanding the needs of applications within the portfolio, is critical for delivering optimal outcomes. 

Furthermore, ensuring that developers have a solid foundation to work on and can efficiently deliver their applications is becoming increasingly important. As multi-cloud environments become the norm, organizations need to be “cloud smart” and have processes and open-source tools in place that enable them to deliver workloads across multiple cloud providers effectively. By being mindful of these considerations, organizations can maximize their cloud spend and optimize their overall cloud strategy.

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