The Cloud ROI Killers
Mike Kavis
Companies who are successful at implementing their cloud strategies can produce impressive returns on their investments . In our Spring Doppler Quarterly cover story , Cloud Economics - Are you getting the bigger picture ? we outlined the many ways to achieve a sound ROI in the cloud .
To achieve these savings , a company must execute on its cloud strategy quickly and effectively . The longer it takes to move legacy applications to the cloud , the more the overall ROI erodes . Too often , cloud migration projects take much longer than estimated . When this happens , the cost of running IT actually goes up , because it takes longer to retire the existing infrastructure . At the same time , new , often poorly managed cloud resources start increasing the overall IT spend .
What are the main ROI killers ?
Politics
Nothing gets in the way of progress more than good old company politics . This comes in many flavors . Sometimes there is disagreement within the ranks over the viability of cloud . Often , the person driving cloud adoption is in direct conflict with the person running the data center . When this occurs , it becomes extremely challenging to make progress , because cloud adoption requires collaboration among all areas of domain expertise .
Conflicts between security teams and development also create unnecessary friction . This leads to need-
Hard Savings Soft Savings
• Reduce spending on compute , storage , networking , and security
• Avoidance of hardware and software purchases ( CapEx )
• Reductions in operational costs , backup and DR / DC
• Reduction in operations-oriented personnel
• Reuse of services and application that allow you to define , and redefine solutions using the same cloud service
• Increase developer productivity
• Improve customer ’ s satisfaction
• Improve employee morale based on the use of cloudbased resources
• Ability to change business processes quickly around new and emerging opportunities
• Increase global reach
4 | THE DOPPLER | FALL 2016