Chief Technology Officer in Consumer Goods, 11 - 50 employees
As internet and facility costs go down and speeds continue to get better.... important to be sure that all of your provider contracts are reexamined at least once a year.Even if you are happy with vendor and have longer term contacts. The mistake is to ignore the 5 year contracts etc and not examine them routinely.
Being transparent with the provider and addressing your needs with them more often will allow you to fix things that need to be addressed sooner.
One example with a hosting provider I asked if their overhead and costs had gone down around the end of year 1 of a
5 year agreement. We found that in fact the facility and overall costs had gone down nearly 30%. We were able to re-negotiate and save almost 25 percent on the balance of the contract. With an addendum that we could revisit again each year.
Another huge mistake is the practice of auto-renewals on contracts. Better to be accountable and force yourself to review... vs the reality that every vendor partner makes huge profits on auto renewals. It just says "hey look at me I am too lazy, busy or indifferent to control our contracts."
That's the foundation of how we afford the ongoing/on demand changes/business requirements.
We also have to remember to buy for future needs not today's. Perform 5 and 10 year sustainability studies and continue to build agile strategies to stay ahead of the budget process.
Stay scalable!!
CTO in Software, 11 - 50 employees
The cost to get onto the Clouds is often quite cheap to get onboard... The real cost I’ve seen is migrating away to a multi-cloud solution, as the Cloud vendors often tie customers up with proprietary databases, custom tools for CI/CD, custom operation dashboards, etc.The best approach is to be Cloud-Vendor agnostic and use generic tools, database migration offerings, and multi cloud enablers like secure, resilient software bus middleware, and REST APIs everywhere...from vendors like Kovair, RedHat, VMware, and others...
This way the cloud vendors are always on their toes to provide the best services possible with economical solutions.
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CTO in Software, 201 - 500 employees
Without a doubt - Technical Debt! It's a ball and chain that creates an ever increasing drag on any organization, stifles innovation, and prevents transformation.Chief Data Officer in Travel and Hospitality, Self-employed
Data & Analytics
1. be very clear about the "fine print" in your cloud vendor contracts, the flexibility in your contracts and how much they do allow you to be truly dynamic when it comes to their "on demand" offerings. Companies like one of the big US ERP players are super keen in gaining cloud business market share and may bring forward attractive offerings but with often limited to no true "on demand" or scale up/down type of flexibility and pricing model.
Also make sure that you've got flexible, short term review / renegotiation clauses in your contract(s)
2. you may indeed want to consider a multi-cloud-vendor approach where you can pick the best one for the respective service that you've got in mind. Downside of multi-vendor, of course, you may face a challenge with "economies of scale" due to reduced volume for each one of them...
3. very well understand the nature and usage as well as computing and/or storage consumption patterns of the applications / systems that you'll want to run out of a cloud environment - peak vs off-peak hours, scale up/down cycles required, data retention/backup requirements, short/medium/long term needs, legacy vs latest applications, etc etc.
4. be very meticulous in your cloud monitoring approach to fully understand utilization, peak/off-peak, scalability requirements, idle of applications, etc and to align your vendor engagement and workload distribution strategy accordingly
5. in case of a multi-vendor approach, you may also want to consider a dynamic / automated / scheduled cloud workload swapping / migration solution or tool. Such in order to move workloads where it may be the most meaningful and the most cost effective at times - one great option there might be solutions like www.nodusplatform.com which also supports offloading of workloads from on-prem to cloud...