The Doppler Quarterly Summer 2019 | Page 37

Cost reduction is one of the top reasons organizations want to leverage public cloud, but without implementing fundamental cost optimization best practices, you may not see your target savings. Depending on which sources you read, you may have expected your cloud program to generate IT cost reductions of 40% to 50% and then been disappointed with the actual savings 1 . According to Gartner, organizations report saving an average of 16% by mov- ing to public cloud, but higher cost reductions are often possible 2 . However, greater sav- ings requires adherence to cost optimization best practices. In a perfect world, cost gov- ernance and optimization strategies would be implemented along with the expansion of your cloud program, but all too often the necessary behavior and policy changes fail to keep pace with technology adoption. The result can be the unpleasant surprise of increased cloud bills long after you expected cost savings. The public cloud represents an opportunity for fast and near infinite infrastructure scal- ability. Therefore, without the correct guardrails, public cloud spend can easily spiral out of control. In some reported cases, cost overruns were bad enough to prompt the repa- triation of 10% of the already migrated workloads away from public cloud 3 . Fortunately, there is an arsenal of options at your disposal to get your cloud spend in check. These range from adjusting the services you consume and implementing new financial con- trols, to adapting your application architectures to take advantage of cloud capabilities. I  DC - Fostering Business and Organizational Transformation to Generate Business Value with Amazon Web Services, 2018, CTP Research 2010-2019 2 Gartner - Is the Public Cloud Cheaper than My Datacenter?, 2018 3 451 Research - The Trouble with Cloud “Repatriation,” 2018 1 SUMMER 2019 | THE DOPPLER | 35