In my last blog post, which you can find here, I highlighted some of the organisational changes companies often make during their transition to the Public Cloud. In this post I will discuss the most common ways that companies make their investments go that bit further.

What are the 6 Rs? 

Many organisations follow Gartner’s 5 R’s for migration, At Softcat we’ve developed the 6 Rs to manage your cloud spend:

Rightsizing – To do this effectively you need to understand maximum & average CPU memory and disk utilisation over a sensible period, to calculate what to rightsize to. Organisations do this effectively using cloud management platforms (we offer this through our Cloud Intelligence Service) and connect to their existing monitoring tools to ensure a full suite of metrics is available.  When it comes to rightsizing, the more data the better.

Reserve capacity – Reserving compute capacity is a key way to save spend on the public cloud. We are always surprised at the amount of organisations who don’t take advantage of reservations or savings plans and although they can be complex not purchasing them is the worst of all approaches. The most successful companies treat these investments like they would a financial portfolio, continually assessing the investment and adapting their position to optimise their spend.

Reschedule – Although it could be said that this is an obvious and simple practice, turning off development and test (DevTest) resources when not in use does lead to significant savings. With public cloud environments changing all the time, the opportunity to accidentally “leave the tap on” increases. Organisations that save the most have been able to turn their DevTest resources off by default and wake them up for a set amount of time, before turning off again.

Retire – Look at what’s not being used and remove it. Disassociated IP addresses, unattached volumes, and instances that are no longer being used, all cost money. The organisations we see operating most effectively set policies to alert and automatically decommission these assets rather than waiting for them to be discovered.

Re-architect – There are a variety of new services being released to help you make your compute and storage spend go further. Make sure you are continually reviewing how your environment is architected to maximise potential savings. Set time to regularly review new service developments and their current, and potential, impact.

Refactor – Development teams often want to refactor everything, but given the time and investment involved it’s not always the right option. Moving to microservices and serverless technologies can save organisations a substantial amount of money, if implemented correctly.

Partner Up!

It’s always helpful to have someone by your side that has seen, and been involved in, multiple cloud journeys for differing organisational needs, sizes and types – they’ll have first-hand experience of some of the pitfalls and can help your organisation through this significant transformation. Softcat’s partnership with CloudHealth, Forester’s recognised leading platform in this space (for which we are EMEA Partner of the Year 2018), has enabled us to develop our Cloud Intelligence Service specifically designed to help customers throughout this journey.

Next time...

In third installment of this blog series we will illustrate the creation and development of the Cloud Intelligence Service; Softcat’s solution to Public Cloud Financial Management. This new Softcat service is helping transform our customers approach to manging their Public cloud spend. 

Pathway to Public Cloud Mini Series:

1. Pathway to Public Cloud: Migration
2. Pathway to Public Cloud: The 6 Rs of Cloud
3. Coming soon!

Contact Us

If you're interested in migrating to the public cloud or have questions around implementing the 6 Rs of Cloud spend in your organisation, please contact your Softcat Account Manager, or fill out the contact form below: