Keep Cloud Costs, Optimization and Automation in Mind to Maximize Customer Satisfaction

… keep them running at peak efficiency. This requires not just ensuring application availability and performance, but also flexibly managing routine system administration, provisioning and capacity allocation. Your customers will also want to proactively optimize applications, workloads and platforms to keep pace with evolving business needs. At the same time, cloud providers are continuously adding and removing features and offerings.

If you and your customers are always playing catch-up on both ends – meeting critical requirements and leveraging best deployment options – your customer is not getting the most from their cloud investment, and you’re spending too much.

And of course, security continues to play a critical role at every level. The risks are widespread and the stakes are sky high. Proactive and comprehensive security management and governance must be an integral part of all ongoing cloud-optimization efforts.

As a trusted adviser, are you confident in your ability to effectively manage so many moving parts on a continual basis?

Signs a customer needs help:

• They think there may be “waste” in their cloud systems, but they don’t have the data or manpower to track it down.
• They are struggling with platform management, performance optimization, cost optimization and capacity allocation on a day-to-day basis.
• The customer is not getting the agility they expected when they moved to the cloud even as expenses are running much higher than expected.

For partners looking for an optimization solution, here are some things to consider as you evaluate your options:

• Is the solution tied to any specific cloud vendor or is it platform- and solution-agnostic?
• Does the supplier have expertise across the platforms, tools and applications your organization uses?
• Can the supplier demonstrate a needs-driven optimization and resource allocation approach?
• Are security and governance an integral part of operations or do they seem bolted on?
• How deep is the supplier’s bench of technology experts?

The Reality: Daily Process and Deployment Management

When organizations move to the cloud, they outsource physical infrastructure, so it should require far fewer resources to manage things, right? Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. They aren’t maintaining hardware, but they or you as a partner must still manage provisioning, deployment and orchestration. That doesn’t just require significant effort, it also means a shift from an infrastructure-centric mindset to an application-centric approach. Even if you or your customer can hire to meet these needs today, what about tomorrow? If their ability to grow and expand is highly dependent on people, they could end up forfeiting one of the main benefits of the cloud: scalability.

You need to ask your customers some probing questions: How does your team handle the day-to-day administration of applications, and scale as the business requires? Do you feel like you have …