Leveraging Cloud Services for ROI and Enhanced Business Agility

Harnessing Cloud Power: Maximizing ROI and Turbocharging Business Flexibility

In today’s business world, regardless of size, across sectors, and around the world, 90% of organizations (and 94% of enterprise organizations), make use of cloud solutions. According to O’Reilly’s 2024 Tech Trends Report, cloud-native solutions have grown by a startling 175%. 

With a market expected to top $1 trillion by 2028, cloud computing benefits are many: faster time to market, reduced hardware costs, easier (and variable) scaling, access to emerging technologies and shared functionality, and greater potential for security, resilience, revenue, flexibility.  

But the word “potential” is key here: these things are not assured. In fact, many businesses adopting a cloud-first strategy are struggling with getting the expected returns on their investment, month after month, and fail to achieve the sort of business agility—adaptation, innovation, and flexibility—they have aimed for. 

In this article, I offer ways to better realize these potentials, focusing on cloud cost optimization and improved agility, with the goal of giving you the greatest return possible from your cloud spend. 

The Importance of the Right Cloud Services 

Among 2024’s trends, O’Reilly tracks a 145% increase in hybrid cloud adoption, with most companies opting for a multi-cloud strategy. 

This move is only practical, reflecting a search for best-of-breed solutions, aiming to maximize efficiency and flexibility both. Gone are the days of picking your cloud provider and then building to your solution by what they happen to offer.  

Today, I urge companies to identify and work towards their own goals first, choosing from among the many cloud solution offerings for those that work best for your specific needs.  

At the same time, I urge caution when it comes to cobbling together solutions on the fly. The best approach is to be mindful of costs and complexities from the outset, by developing, and maintaining, a clearly-defined strategy. With cloud providers increasingly bundling together unique partnerships and offerings, it’s more important than ever before that the technologies in each selected cloud stack match to these needs.  

Consider the technologies and businesses tied into each provider to ensure compatibility, before you consider adding them to your multi-cloud solution. 

This planning must also anticipate the workloads you will be needing, before implementation, to help you project costs and the appropriate provisioning.  

And as needs change constantly, so too must your planning, with continued, centralized oversight.  

Maximizing ROI in Cloud Computing 

One undoubted benefit of cloud offerings is the cost savings up front. An on-prem solution requires staffing, hardware, and software that may be difficult to obtain, coupled with the extreme difficulty of anticipating your scaling needs, providing redundancies, and delivering to all needed targets. 

But the risk is in costs that creep up, untended, over the longer term, as your investment plays out in ways that may not be going quite as anticipated.  

This can include things such as: 

1. Overprovisioning and Idle Resources: The classic: allocating more than is necessary, or not using what you are paying for 

2. Inefficient Architecting: Poorly optimized cloud resources can lead to unnecessary redundancies across the board 

3. “Shadow” IT: Runaway cloud purchases, be it for short-term need, or without proper oversight, not only run up costs but also can pose security risks 

Establishing FinOps in cloud computing, by bringing together finance, technology, and business teams in a single, operational framework, is an increasingly popular way to control and maximize your ongoing cloud spend. 

This approach emphasizes transparency, visibility, and optimization, driving business value from the cloud with financial accountability and data-driven decision making as the end goal.  

The FinOps best principles include: 

1. Collaboration as Key: Continuous, inter-team communication helps with the real-time, variable nature of cloud usage 

2. Value-Driven Decision-Making: Value-driven metrics can determine impact better than trying to dissect your aggregate, staying focused on the trade-offs in cost, quality, and speed 

3. Team Ownership of Cloud Usage: Accountability is kept at the fore among teams, who can be empowered to manage cloud use against their own budget 

4. Data is Accessible and Timely: FinOps gathers and distributes cost data regularly, with faster feedback to steer greater efficiency and team-based best practices 

5. A Centralized Team: This FinOps team, like security, takes the lead though everyone is responsible; it can encourage greater executive buy-in and help with rate negotiations at scale 

6. Making Variable Cost Your Friend: Instead of foe, seizing on agile iteration to continuously adjust and optimize your cloud footprints 

Enhancing Your Business Agility 

In all this talk about practicality, it can be easy to miss one of the main benefits of cloud services, which FinOps can also help you enable, and that is flexibility.  

Business agility with cloud solutions means being free to adjust quickly, seizing on market changes, and emerging opportunities. It is embracing newness, acting on insights from real-time data, steering every team in your organization to create value, rather than simply exist to complete siloed tasks. 

The cloud can be the ultimate technological gateway to such a goal, though in practice this is often not the case.  

Consider what it can bring: 

1. Scalability: Discussed several times here already, the cloud enables pay-as-you-use models, with the capacity to rapidly upscale, downscale, and add new functionalities on need 

2. Rapid Deployment: Automation through a number of services and tools, should speed up workflows and enable your CI/CD  

3. Redundancy, Recovery, and Business Continuity: Protection and hardware management at scale *should* improve the burden of back-ups, allowing quicker restoration and less downtime 

Properly managed, the cloud is the perfect tool for agility. Serverless computing can execute code on demand (allocating resources as needed), and container technologies (like Kubernetes) allow for even greater scaling, self-healing, and highly variable storage options. 

But all of these things, as great as they sound, only bring value if your organization can seize on it. 

Conclusion 

To lead in technology is to embrace change, but one must do so with reason. FinOps is one example of a way to merge these two goals together within your own organization.  

As Apple co-founder Steve Jobs said in an interview with Business Week in 1998: 

“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.”  

The same is true about our cloud services: to be truly agile, and get the best ROI from your footprint looks far easier than it is. 

In practice, this requires extensive preparation, consistent and active oversight, and a willingness to embrace adaptability.  

The rewards are certainly worth it, if you’re up for the challenge.