2023 is going to be the year customers demand cost efficiency around their cloud spend after a decade of runaway budget growth. Consider the following data from our partner and friends at ISG:
Two seemingly contradictory forces are at tension with each other:
- Cloud infrastructure spend will surpass a $500B annualized run rate by end of 2023 and aggregate cloud spend will overtake traditional IT infrastructure spend by 2025. Remarkable transformation of Enterprise IT led by Amazon, Microsoft, and Google!
- The pace of Cloud growth is slowing and enterprises are much more focused on ensuring value against their existing spend. This is particularly true as we head into potentially recessionary waters this year.
Solving for this problem is our mission at DigitalEx. We have found that the typical enterprise IT organization has a heterogeneous infrastructure map – whether by design or by accident. With all the best intentions, people have ended up with a mix of public cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, and GCP most typically) alongside on-prem private cloud assets (VMware typically). As they try and diagnose how to optimize their spend, customers inevitably need to compare and consolidate costs across their various clouds.
Often, the most basic questions they ask themselves as they try and wring value from their existing spend are:
- How much am I actually spending across all my clouds? Seemingly a question with an obvious answer but it definitely is not for most organizations we speak with. Especially those with private cloud assets.
- Once I establish a baseline on spend today, can I forecast my spend tomorrow?
- Am I actually using all of the cloud capacity I have bought or is some of it sitting idle?
- Am I paying the best unit prices possible or am I leaking budget via on-demand pricing?
- How do my clouds compare from a cost efficiency POV? Should I be moving workloads to different clouds to improve performance?
To help answer these questions, DigitalEx has built a single pane of glass to consolidate all costs and relative cost efficiencies across all clouds a given customer may run. The intent here is to give customers a *basic* tool to understand how each cloud is performing and to make relatively simple changes. Those changes might be:
- Use the cost data to renegotiate better rates with their IaaS providers
- Move workloads where possible to more cost efficient clouds
As we continue to develop our technology, we will be generating more sophisticated recommendations where we can match specific workloads to specific clouds. We are excited about this future but even today, Step #1 here is simply to understand the true cost picture across all clouds and shift budget to the more efficient platforms.
– DigitalEx Team –
