Cloud Hosting

If one segment of the tech industry absolutely loves COVID-19, it's definitely cloud vendors. Whether it's public cloud infrastructure or all the managed services that run on them, the pandemic has companies accelerating cloud adoption just to keep the business working with no one in the office. In fact, a study by Synergy Research Group has business cloud spending growing by 35% in 2020 and exceeding on-prem data center and software, which dropped by 6% in the same year.

Now factor in that the pandemic has us all fired up about hybrid work, with IDC research predicting that up to 90% of enterprises will be permanently using that model by the end of 2022. That doesn't just mean employees working on their couch. It's that plus multi-cloud for mission-critical apps that now need to span hybrid workers. This is where some resources are at HQ, some are in the cloud, some managed services are on one cloud while others are in another cloud, some workers are at home, some are in the office. If you're an IT pro, that's giving you a headache. If you're a CFO, it's about to give you a migraine.

Just because SMBs are moving back to the office, they're not going to scale back cloud spend. Hybrid work necessitates new kinds of managed services to bridge that couch-to-office gap. You'll need that in the new normal because empowering remote workers using cloud apps is simply more cost-effective, but it's still a new cost. And it's probably not the only cloud cost you need to look at.

But that doesn't mean you shouldn't take close look at what you've got clouding around out there. A recent survey by CloudCheckrfound that 35% of companies reported unused virtual servers that were never disabled, 34% said employee adoption of cloud infrastructure and services was often low, and 32% said that apps they tried to migrate to the cloud were blocked because the realities of cloud architecture weren't taken into account prior to the move.

And the CloudCheckr survey doesn't even take into account managed services. Shadow IT, a pandemic, and a cloud computing universe that has a marketing answer for pretty much any kind of workload without your IT guys ever needing to wander into a data center, is a bad recipe for your wallet.

And don't kid yourself, it's happened. The pandemic didn't just hit us hard, it hit us fast. So more than a few SMB operators simply told teams to tap into whatever cloud services they needed to deal with remote work and left IT to play catch-up. So where does that leave you now that things are starting to return to sanity?

It leaves you doing math, but you need to do more than just the basics. Sure, do an audit first. What's in the cloud now? Why did someone put it there? Tally that up and see what you're spending now and what you were spending in 2019. Now you know how much more money is floating up into the cloud and why. But the next step takes more homework.

Is the cost justified or is there a cheaper way? That's not just math, that's some real deep investigation into not only what kinds of easy peasy cloud services are relevant, but also what's still possible in that musty, dusty data closet. Think about that for a bit, and you'll realize it's a lot of work, but it's also necessary work that you need to finish as soon as possible.

And there are other ouch factors to consider:

Your IT skillset. Clouds like Azure and AWS aren't lightweight environments. Yeah, you can spin up a Windows server in a few minutes, but spinning up dozens of them, connecting them, clustering them, connecting on- and off-prem clients to them, installing whatever workloads you need on them, and then making sure they can handle a sudden scaling need or disaster recovery problem...no, that's not easy and it's only part of a much longer list of requirements. You can't be an IT generalist to handle all that. You need full-on devops personnel, which means you need to factor in that cost.

Security. Every public cloud server that talks to clients or another server in a different cloud is a target both on its own and when that communication happens. Every client talking to any cloud service is a potentially vulnerable data exchange. All that data stored in the cloud is open to all kinds of attacks or simple carelessness from the service manager. Sure it's convenient, but even with a surge in cloud security, it's still a vulnerable environment and you need to secure yours as much as you can. That'll need a budget infusion, too.

The real cost of remote workers. We all know hybrid work is here to stay, but how much is that really going to cost? IT has been managing remote problems, like client, router, and bandwidth issues, on an ad hoc basis. Solve the problem any way you can till things return to normal. Ok, but we're almost there, and now the remote scenario looks permanent. That means you need to come up with a long-term plan, and that covers a lot of ground. Probably new management software, but what's it need to do exactly? And do you give everyone a new router so IT can standardize; how much will that cost? How do you need to update your help desk? Do you need to pay for home worker bandwidth just to keep a hybrid workload moving smoothly? That's a lot of questions, and it's only a few of the ones you'll need to ask. Others will include space management software for hot-desking, employee monitoring, and new "hybrid optimized" software, like say, Windows 11.

Cloud services are a great resource for a hybrid work model. But considering cost is a necessary step if you want to keep your IT budget in the black even in 2021. It's not just about the bill. It's matching the bill to how it affects your business' capabilities. Time to sit your IT team down, figure out the questions, and start coming up with the answers. 2022 isn't that far off. Don't agree? Hit me in the comments.

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How Much Is Hybrid Work Really Going to Cost? - PCMag