Category: Cloud Series

With so many businesses making the move to the Cloud to benefit from its greater mobility, there has been a lot of conversation around such moves in terms of usefulness, cost, and security.

At MetrixData360, we have heard many conversations about the Cloud, some of them containing only half-truths about the Cloud and its benefits. In this post, we will look at four of the most common myths about moving to the cloud and debunk some of the misconceptions about the benefits of making the move.

1. “Moving to the Cloud is Cheaper than Having Everything On-Premises”

This is not entirely false. It can be cheaper to move to the Cloud compared to keeping everything in house. It can also give your IT budget an ulcer if done incorrectly.

Your instances could be sized improperly, your licenses could not permit you to migrate to the Cloud, or your IT department could spin up as many instances as they want without having a real grasp of how billing for their Cloud environment actually works.

In fact, many companies we’ve come across have had to rethink how they are transitioning to the Cloud halfway through the process, simply because they discovered it was far more costly than they anticipated.

For further details into cost issues when moving to the Cloud, visit our article on 5 Problems When Moving to the Cloud.

2. “I Have to Move Everything to the Cloud”

There’s nothing stopping you from doing this. Many businesses (Netflix comes to mind) have chosen to exist solely on the Cloud. Obviously, though, it probably won’t prove ideal for every company.

Some vendors won’t let you take your licenses to the Cloud, while other vendors will permit it. The Cloud also provides a variety of services that can meet your company’s unique needs. The Private Cloud offers three main services:

After you’ve established what you want, if you’re allowed to do it, and at what cost, you may find that a hybrid deployment where some applications remain on-prem while others are Cloud-based is the right way for your organization to move to the Cloud.

Hybrid profiles are something that many businesses are choosing after they discover a full transition is too costly. A hybrid deployment can offer the business benefits of the Cloud, while providing you with the flexibility required not to blow the IT budget out of the water.

3. “Whether or Not the Cloud is Safer than On-Prem Is a Simple Yes or No Answer”

There has been a heated debate going on for a while now about how safe it is to store your data on the Cloud. Massive breaches in security and outages of power have been known to happen, but these scenarios fail to acknowledge the systems that are set in place to improve security and storage.

It is also important to note that the only real place your data would be 100% safe from malware and hackers would be buried in a tin can in your backyard, like Microsoft did with Github (and even then, I’m sure there’s a hacker somewhere out there with a shovel).

You run the risk of a breach whenever you interact online, regardless of whether you are on-prem or in the Cloud. When you are in the Cloud, the types of security risks you encounter change from the challenges faced when your environment was on-prem. When your environments are on-prem, your biggest threats are:

Meanwhile, when you are in the Cloud, the biggest threats you have to worry about are:

Knowing the type of risks that you are exposed to in the Cloud can make you better prepared to counteract them.

4. “I Have to be Really into Technology to Understand the Cloud”

This may currently be the case, but it doesn’t have to be.

A study conducted by Citrix in 2012 and presented in the Washington Post found that the majority of Americans do not understand what the Cloud is. 51% of participants thought stormy weather could interfere with the Cloud and 54% said they had never used it before, despite the fact that 95% of them had.

The Cloud is the force behind so much of the Internet, from online banking to popular free email services. For something that has been so quietly entrenched in our everyday lives, it’s important to understand at least the basics of how it works.

The quick explanation is that the Cloud is merely a series of large computers, servers, and data centers (the kind that fill massive warehouses) that are set up around the world where anyone can access it and upload data to it. In exchange for hosting data, people can pay rent for the computing space.

Having your IT infrastructure exclusively within your business is like owning your own house in the countryside. You’re in charge of maintenance; it’s more of a chore to get things to and from your property, and you have more space than you probably need, but there is a greater sense of privacy.

Being in the Cloud, on the other hand, is like renting an apartment in the city with albeit limited space, but you have easier access to things and other people. Congratulations, you now have a basic understanding of the Cloud.

More Information on Making the Move to the Cloud

Moving to the Cloud can be a time of uncertainty, especially when you’re not sure if such a massive project will benefit your company. At MetrixData360, we aim to debunk these myths and find a solution that is right for you.

Not being properly aware of the advantages and disadvantages of moving to the Cloud can cost your company huge, unforeseen, and ultimately unnecessary expenses. It is so important that you’re aware of the risks before you migrate to the Cloud.

If you’d like more information about the Cloud and how to best prepare for your Cloud migration, you can click the link below to visit our Cloud Page where, regardless of the platform you choose, MetrixData 360 can help you through this confusing time.

4 Cloud Optimization Best Practices

Are you ready for your Cloud Migration? Moving to the Cloud is an exciting event for any company but it can be a headache if done incorrectly. Throughout our seven years in software asset management business, we’ve seen companies who have had their software costs escalate to staggering numbers during and after their Cloud migration. At Metrixdata360, we want to make sure you get the most out of your software environment, so to make sure your transition is easy, cost-effective, and stays that way as you settle into your new software estate, here are four tips you can implement for you own cloud optimization.

1. Get Ready to Move to the Cloud

Before your company comes to the decision to go to the Cloud, make sure that you are well prepared for the task at hand. According to Microsoft Azure’s How to optimize your cloud investment with Azure Cost Management, make sure you have a clear outline of what problem you aim to solve when heading to the Cloud, and make sure that moving to the Cloud is the best decision for your company.

Get everyone on board with the Cloud move, which includes making sure the Financial and IT departments are on the same page and have systems in place that can account for both cost and visibility. If you have a Software Asset Manager or Team, make sure that they are ready for the transition, as a large part of their job will be moving with the Cloud migration. Estimate how long you want your company to be on the Cloud and find a billing model that can suit your needs (there are short term estates offered by Microsoft Azure for free).

Before the days of the Cloud, companies would have to buy physical on-premise hardware that would come with a fixed amount of space and that remains the mindset of companies as they move to the Cloud. Often, they will overbuy on space in order to accommodate anticipated growth which made sense when you were dealing with a fixed asset.

Cloud, however, works more like a subscription and can be altered to fit your company’s needs on a monthly basis. Does your company have a busy season where you will need more space compared to the rest of the year? Does your company virtually shut down on the weekends? You can arrange to have your Cloud estate reflect such needs easily.

For a more in-depth look at problems your company is exposed to during your move to the Cloud, see our blog post 5 Problems When Moving to the Cloud.

2. Check Your Software Licenses

Many companies head for the Cloud thinking that they can take their software licenses with them and they are not completely wrong. Some publishers let you take their applications to the Cloud, but others distinctly do not and it’s important to know who is who. This is where Cloud optimization begins to shine and show its value.

Think about applications that might carry sensitive information like credit card numbers or patient records and it’s likely that the vendors of those applications will be unwilling to let you take their licensed software to the Cloud for security reasons.

The licensing metric changes as well once you enter the Cloud and it’s typically the case that a license, once moved to the Cloud, will not go as far to cover as many servers as it once did when it was on-premise. This will leave you with a few unlicensed servers suddenly on your hands after the transition is finished. Make sure you take extra care to understand your licenses and if moving to the Cloud is even possible without finding yourself in breach of your contracts or with a staggering compliance gap.

3. Calculate Your Cloud Costs

One thing that is also important to do before you’ve even started the Cloud transition is have a budget set in place. How to Optimize Your Cloud Investment with Azure Cost Management from Microsoft Azure points out that the Azure calculator is one available tool at your disposal that can calculate how much any combination of Azure’s services will cost. With a budget set in place to limit your IT’s spending and you can know where your money is going.

SAM tools have traditionally been an excellent way of tracking your software spending but you must ensure that your SAM tools are equipped to handle Cloud-based data, since many SAM tools struggle to work with something as new as Cloud. With a budget set in place and the right SAM tools that can monitor those changes, you will also be able to detect where you are overspending so that you will be able to re-bundle those resources to where they will actually be useful.

4. Ensure Visibility and Accountability

One of the biggest issues we’ve seen during a company’s Cloud transition is being unable to keep track of assets. Giving Cloud access to your whole IT department to spin up as many instances as they want can leave you with virtual sprawl and instances that are forgotten while they drain your software budget.

Set an infrastructure in place that can regulate who has permission to spin up instances and make sure that projects are completely decommissioned after they have concluded. In addition to monitoring usage, set a well-informed software budget and investigate if prices have unexpectedly spiked beyond your predetermined price.

2 Models for Optimizing Cloud Cost from BMC Blogs offers two types of solutions for IT departments to manage their Cloud estates. The first model depends on the IT department checking their tools daily and from there perform a series of cost saving tasks.

The model asks that IT members express constant awareness of resources, analyze those resources and from there, optimize the company’s spending with the information that they have. The second model offers a cycle that needs to be performed on a monthly or bi-monthly basis. This cycle focuses on aging, idle and inactive material.

If you are prepared for what to expect, moving to the Cloud can be a satisfying experience that can improve the flexibility of your company and better protect your data from being lost. These four practices will get you ready for your Cloud Transition and more importantly, they will make sure that your software budget doesn’t start spiking the moment you hit the Cloud. If you’re ready to improve your Cloud Optimization, continue onto our Learning Center to learn more about the Cloud.

Moving to the Cloud is tremendously useful for (significantly) reducing the number of servers required to run your environment efficiently. Salesforce, in their article Why Move To The Cloud? 10 Benefits Of Cloud Computing Operating, talks about some of the benefits of entering the Cloud which can include greater flexibility, excellent disaster recovery systems, increased collaboration and less money spent on hardware. However, before you get too excited to join the Great Cloud Migration, here are some important things to keep in mind before you make the transition.

Size Matters: Instances are Sized Correctly

In the past, when you wanted to digitize your work, a physical piece of hardware would arrive on-premise with a defined amount of storage to accommodate your license instance storage requirements.
If your operations only required 200 GB per server, it would then be a smart investment to purchase servers that offered 500 GB just in case your organization grew and you needed more storage as business boomed.

Purchasing storage in that manner made sense when you were dealing with a fixed, physical asset. Now, as organizations migrate to the Cloud, we are still seeing the tendency for purchasing more space than what is actually required in anticipation of future growth.

The Cloud isn’t a physical, fixed asset that you own with storage limitations attached to a piece of hardware. Welcome to a subscription-style storage solution with an a la carte menu that can be augmented or adjusted as needed – whenever it’s needed. If organizations only require 200 GB of space for nine months of the year, then get what you need for as long it’s needed and certainly hold off purchasing more than required in advance!

Assuming You Can Bring Your Own Licenses To The Cloud (BYOL)

If you assume you can bring your own licenses, then you are…not exactly wrong. For some software publishers, their contracts do allow you to move licenses from on-premise to the Cloud – but not always on a 1 to 1 instance basis. Other software publishers do not allow for license use rights to be transferred from on-premise to the Cloud – therefore putting you at risk of being in a non-compliance position with that vendor for the remainder of your contract term.

It is very important to do your due diligence in understanding your contract permissions and restrictions and plan the timing of a Cloud migration strategy accordingly. Not all vendors and products can move at the same time. Consider any applications that might carry sensitive data like patient records or customer credit card information, it is highly unlikely the publisher of that software will let you take that information anywhere near the Cloud. Such an act would prove a huge liability to you as well as to them since the Cloud has been known to have massive breaches in security.

For some publishers, you need to purchase specific Cloud licenses for a piece of software, and for others (to make things even more confusing) they offer a hybrid use right. There are also vendors like Microsoft, who will offer you the right to use their on-premise and SA licenses on their specific Cloud (Azure is one of Microsoft’s).

Service Provider Licensing Agreements are their own battle entirely. Service Provider Licensing Agreements permit a third-party vendor to provide the software to clients as a service. SPLAs usually acts as a monthly service provider and is flexible on a monthly basis. The problem is that these resellers are now also offering Cloud servers, but you will be on the liability-hook for anything that is running in your Cloud space.

Translation Error: Not Understanding How Your Licenses Will Change When Moving To The Cloud

When moving to the Cloud, many companies think that their licenses that they are currently using on-premise will seamlessly cover them for use in the Cloud. If you have 20 servers, you should be allowed that same amount of space on the Cloud, right? However, not all licenses are allowed to be used in the Cloud, so it’s important that you review your contracts and the use rights of all products you move to the Cloud to understand what you can and cannot do.

Otherwise, as you transition to the Cloud, you’ll come across a different licensing metric that will suddenly leave you with a few unlicensed servers or, even worse, in complete violation of the vendors licensing rules.

Let’s take Microsoft’s Azure Hybrid Benefits (AHB) as an example. AHB gives you some rights to use your licenses up in the Cloud, so purchasing it should mean that moving to the Cloud is made simple, but it’s not. You may be licensing your on-premise VMWare Servers with Windows DataCenter, and this would allow you to have an unlimited number of Virtual Windows Servers (VMs) on that single VMWare server.

However, if you have 20 VMs on the server, it might be easy to assume you can move all 20 VMs to Azure without paying for Windows Server Licenses since you have unlimited virtualization rights but this will leave you open for a big surprise. The truth is that the AHB only allows you to cover up to 2 VMS with the licenses that you are using to cover 20 VMs, leaving 18 VMs of Windows exposed to a license compliance gap.

Not Tracking Who Is Installing Software

Companies moving to the cloud often give their IT and development departments the ability to set up as many Cloud instances as they believe they may require, making it difficult to track who is doing what. Without any sort of administrative oversight, the potential to become exposed to disorganization can create a lot of unnecessary sprawl and forgotten instances left plugged into your environment that will be draining your budget quietly in the corner. In our many years of experience, we were once approached by a client whose software bills had spiked mysteriously seemingly overnight.

After doing our research, we traced the spending back to a single server belonging to a junior IT assistant. The junior IT resource, with a single click of a button, had accidentally turned on an unnecessary storage application that was now collecting data from the entire company. When the assistant had turned the storage app on, he had done so thinking that the product cost a little over a dollar a minute to run. Scaled up to the whole company though, that was an additional $4,000 a month, all because no one was monitoring what was being activated in the Cloud.

To make matters worse, according to Timothy Morrow from Carnegie Mellon University, the deletion of data is difficult to monitor on the Cloud. Once deleted, the process to ensure that it is completely removed and fully inactive varies from provider to provider. Make sure that whenever a project is set up in the Cloud, you have a system in place that can properly track it so that you can ensure it has been decommissioned once the project has concluded.

Not Monitoring Usage Regularly

This is another byproduct of not having any sort of administrative oversight around Cloud usage. If instances are established with no oversight they could be left running unknowingly. It’s important that you monitor the activities that occur in your space in the Cloud, that goes for usage as well as installation. Your financial department will be unable to calculate down to the number where and how all the organization’s money is being spent. They can only see the lump sum amounts that can be investigated if something is truly amiss. In any operation’s budget, Cloud expenses can come across as small expenses and can be easily overlooked until they expand into a big spending problem.

Potentially, the task of monitoring and authorizing installation use in the Cloud could be delegated to your Software Asset Manager. As companies are steadily picking up and moving their hardware to the Cloud, the same people that have to manage your software assets on-premise are going to have to learn to do the same on the Cloud. That way you can be sure you are only paying for what is being used.

While it may seem like everyone is heading for the Cloud, it is important to put proper planning/sizing and environment need analysis in advance of making the move. At Metrixdata360, we are quite familiar with these challenges your business will face as you move into the Cloud and as such, we have developed SAM tools that can help you counteract these challenges. We have a tool-set that can monitor your environment constantly to track a timeline of your usage so that you can see exactly where and when your money is being spent. Our main goal is to save you money and control your expenses.

For more information about our SAM services and how we can help you through your Cloud transition, click here.