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“Capacity management is the most underestimated problem of cloud computing.”   Morgan Stanley strategy director Evangelos Kotsovinos.

I recently came across the above quote from Evangelos. He hits the nail on the head for most businesses who have taken the step to move to the cloud. Capacity Management is fundamental and highly underestimated – but why? We know that Capacity Management is a tricky balancing act – and that’s why we’re offering a 2-week free trial of Capacity Optimization as a Service (COaaS). I’ll aim to shed some light on the issue and also point out some areas where Fusion are well positioned to help your business.

Reducing the cost of IT Legacy operations

“Move to the cloud and all will be cheaper,” has been the saying in recent years.  Large scale cloud infrastructures do indeed have lower operating costs. However, we are seeing almost every IT Enterprise struggle to keep public and private cloud costs under control.

Cost reduction in the cloud is all about command and control. Command of knowing what is being used where, and control over the ever-expanding computing footprint. The critical capabilities for command and control of IaaS-based services include:

• Knowledge of what is there today
• Knowledge of how much is being used today
• Pre-migration cost analysis for services spanning multiple cloud providers
• Continued measurement of utilisation and costs post migration
• Automation to help drive control and reduce manual intervention

Given these basic principles, here are my five keys areas to ensure you get the most out of your cloud strategy.

Full understanding of what you have today

Fusion COaaS is able to give you full visibility of exactly what is being used today. This is the most fundamental step of all – yet the one that most organisations struggle with. You need to know what IT assets you have, but also how they relate to deliver business services consumed by the end-users. It is about understanding how resources are being used across the entire set of services and how the resource consumptions respond to business events. What are the service bottlenecks? And what resources are underutilised?

You need a combination of mature service design, service transition and capacity management processes coupled with automated cloud-enabled discovery. This works hand in hand with application service mapping and capacity planning tooling.

Knowledge of what you’re using and what it costs

Many organisations build their cloud migration business case using a set of assumptions about their current data centre costs. Unfortunately, these costs are not granular enough and typically exclude finer infrastructure details such as power, cooling and networks. This wasn’t always a problem, as most IT departments do not cross charge or show costs back to the business. However, cloud service providers account for every penny and they issue bills for resources not fully accounted for.

Capacity planners have a significant input into the cost modelling of services. With Fusion COaaS, we’re able to pinpoint exactly where you are over and under provisioned.

Have a clear view on cloud cost options before migration

Building a business case for migration to the cloud needs to consider costs across multiple cloud providers, so you can choose the most appropriate pricing plan. Knowing what you have, how they are being utilised and how much you are paying for them prior to migration are the building blocks to understanding costs post migration.

The more automated this process is, the more accurate and effective the outcomes will be.

Assign cloud tags correctly

Cloud tags are a labelling mechanism used by cloud providers to help carry out functions such as automation, security management, and tracking costs and assets. They are designated to assets and services and are fundamental for tracking service ownerships and associated costs. Ensuring your tags are consistent across your services and cloud providers is just as important as knowing the resources you are using.

I drill down into more detail on what best practice typically looks like and how to apply a consistent tagging plan in another blog: 7 steps for managing multi-cloud expenses.

Continue monitoring expenses using baseline costs

So, we know what we have, how they are being used, and how much they are costing us. The business case is built, and the right service provider is chosen. We now need to continue monitoring how much resources are being used, and whether the cost models we built prior to migration are still on track.  This is a critical function that should be owned and carried out by capacity managers.

In summary, the old ways of standing up and operating services in a data centre are no longer viable for the cloud. In the past, Capacity Management could take a backseat, but it is now a critical discipline for managing and controlling cloud services. It supports key functions in migrating IT services to the cloud and providing the visibility and control for their efficient operation.

Fusion COaaS can help reduce costs by identifying opportunities to reclaim underutilized assets and right-size capacity, optimize changes, and perform cost-driven optimization.

Ready to optimize computing capacity across your whole business? Take the first step by signing up to Fusion’s 2-week free COaaS trial.