Why do organisations move to the cloud? Cloud platforms can provide greater flexibility and control over your environments. They also allow organisations to build and deploy faster than when compared with traditional on premise platforms by making use of Infrastructure as Code and other environment delivery mechanisms. Allowing the organisation to shift their focus to the end user and developing solutions and processes that add value.

Many organisations are either beginning their journey to the cloud, currently migrating to the cloud or already on the cloud. A lot of these organisations will have already discovered that their cost of operating in the cloud is more expensive than when they were running the same service on premise. Then there are organisations that have been deterred from moving to cloud based on forecasted spend. Below are some contributing factors why:

Non-Defined Architecture Principles

When moving to the cloud, many believe that a lift and shift of services from their existing on premises environment to their cloud platform of choice is the best option for them. Though this may be the case for those beginning their journey to the cloud or those who are time constraint and need to exit datacentre facilities, it is important to remember to innovate and transform when in the cloud. Build Cloud Native – to fully make use of the possible savings to be had on the cloud, ensure your applications and services are cloud native. What does this mean? Make use of a wider set of cloud offerings, such as PaaS. Services such as Azure Functions, or AWS Lambda, Azure SQL or AWS Aurora. By using services such as these, you will move away from continual spend on IaaS services to consumption based costs, where you pay for service consumption.

The wrong choice of service

With the breadth of services available from the big cloud providers today, it’s easy enough to get confused and be misguided when deciding which service to migrate or transition to. These decisions are made upfront and then taken forward with speed taking precedence over cost efficiencies, leaving a legacy of inefficient spend which then builds up. Having a mechanism to revamp and recover that cost is important and at KPMG, we can support your understanding of how your existing landscape should map against the services on offer by your target cloud platform to help ensure that you making the most of your cloud environment.

Poor Rightsizing/Scaling

A key mistake that is made when moving to cloud, is the incorrect rightsizing/scaling of infrastructure. Whether it be the type of VM, EC2 Instance or App Service Plan, we commonly find that that resources are not optimised or reviewed often enough. Time again, we have found similar issues with a lot of our clients where they have migrated resources to the cloud and often find resources utilising 10% of the hardware allocation made available to them – all while paying for 100% of the allocation. Reviewing your resource sizing can help decrease your cost by almost 15% on average and is something that we strongly recommend.

These are only a few ways to achieve a cost reduction in the cloud and we at KPMG, jointly with our Technical Architecture and Cost Management practises, are constantly seeking more ways to reduce cost as cloud platform providers enhance their services.

Migrating to the cloud is highly complex, costly and time-consuming; find out how we at KPMG can help you along this journey.

Get in touch!