Cost and Uptime Will Be Cloud Executive's Top Challenges in the New Year

Since the onset of the pandemic nearly three years ago, organizations have rapidly expanded their cloud architectures in search of IT flexibility and scalability. Additionally, many of these companies have been leveraging multiple cloud providers to gain better performance, high speed, and greater protection against downtime in the long-term future.

But while global organizations have been rapidly adopting cloud-native solutions, many executives are now pumping the brakes due to market headwinds and skyrocketing cloud costs. IT teams are under tremendous pressure to monitor and reduce cloud costs from the initial cloud migration to managing to spend once the deployment is complete. In fact, Wanclouds data indicates that 81% of IT leaders say their C-Suite has directed them to reduce or take on no additional cloud spending as organizations cut costs amid the market tumult.

As a result, digital transformation initiatives are being rolled back, paused, or abandoned altogether. With the new year right around the corner, cloud executives need to enter Q1 with a game plan; they will need to understand the two biggest challenges ahead in 2023.

Companies Are Reaching a Cloud Spending Breaking Point

Over the last three years, cloud spending has reached profound new heights as organizations undertake digital transformations. Furthermore, costs have multiplied as demand for raw computing power for the cloud has soared, and supply has been constrained due to supply chain interruption.

Our polling of 500 IT decision-makers recently found that 53% say they've been hit with more unexpected cloud bills than planned in 2022. This inability to track costs across multi-cloud environments efficiently has forced their companies to dial back cloud spending.

Most organizations are trimming down their cloud infrastructure and selecting only the essential services among various cloud solution providers. And due to the growing popularity of Kubernetes and containerized applications, organizations can pivot quickly when service levels change, and more cost-efficient solutions become available.

Unfortunately, container utilization will continue to be costly in 2023, as 70% of those implementing Kubernetes reported to Wanclouds that it has also increased their overall cloud spending. With that said, we're sure many folks by now have heard the phrase "cost optimization" being thrown around. What many don't know is that cloud optimization is beneficial not only for companies that are new to the cloud but also for companies that have been investing in cloud technology for the last few years. And it will only become more vital next year.

For those needing help understanding the concept, cloud optimization analyzes, configures, and right-sizing cloud resources to boost performance and minimize costs. Most importantly, cloud optimization is one tool organizations will want to keep, as it's the only current solution that gives organizations the visibility needed to track spending.

While cloud providers like Amazon provide basic tools for resource tracking and spend visibility, these features generally fail to deliver real-time and enterprise-wide insights on optimizing costs. And therefore, new cost optimization solutions will be needed by IT professionals to address this challenge in the year ahead.

Uptime and Disaster Recovery Is Still Imperative

Outside of cost, a secondary challenge that will remain top of mind for cloud executives in 2023 is ensuring cloud uptime. According to the Uptime Institute's annual report, complex hybrid and distributed architectures only increased downtime in 2022. Within the report, one in five organizations stated they had experienced a “serious” or “severe” IT outage.

Therefore, it’s not a surprise that many organizations are thinking about disaster recovery. In addition to downtime attributed to digital infrastructure, extreme weather events have become more frequent and increase the risk of natural disasters or power outages, leading to data loss. And while multi-cloud environments enable developer flexibility, they also cause inherent configuration and visibility problems, leading to security threats.

With costs becoming increasingly excessive, avoiding downtime has never been more important, nor has it been more challenging to achieve. As such, a cloud-based disaster recovery strategy must be embedded within companies' cloud management plans. Without one, every business risks losing vital data and having its systems, operations, or services shut down by natural and man-made disasters, security risks, hardware failures, and power outages.

For businesses with applications in the cloud, this means getting up to speed with cloud deployments and migrations and protecting their cloud infrastructure in time, and cost-efficient ways have never been more critical. However, more than deploying any disaster recovery strategy, a clear understanding of your organization's current infrastructure and assets is required.

Additionally, traditional disaster recovery options may need more flexibility and mobility than businesses as they increasingly transition to hybrid and public cloud environments. Instead, they may be better suited to disaster recovery as a service solution that provides continuous data protection without the hefty price tag and added complexities.

But considering 62% of AWS experts say their organization wouldn't be able to withstand even a minute of downtime on the back of a data loss event, disaster recovery cannot be ignored in the year ahead.

A Limited Time Offer of Cloud Cost Optimization & Disaster Recovery for $9.99

The challenges illustrated above are why Wanclouds is excited to offer IT teams a limited-time promotion giving AWS and IBM Cloud users enterprise-wide spend visibility and cost optimization for just $9.99 per resource through its new Cost Optimization as a Service (COaaS) solution.

The offer includes Disaster Recovery as a Service for Kubernetes and Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) configurations and blueprints for one year, enabling AWS and IBM Cloud users to unlimited backup clusters and VPC configurations and restore them on-demand through its coveted Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution.

Wanclouds’ COaaS leverages proprietary analytics on users’ cost and usage data, as well as Amazon’s Cost Explorer in the case of AWS to give customers a view into the cost of cloud resources, recommendations on infrastructure changes for optimization, purpose tagging, backups, as well as resource pause options.

Rightsizing recommendations use wancloud's algorithm to identify the optimal cloud instance for each workload. More importantly, unlike most cost optimization providers, Wanclouds enables users to take action on these cost savings recommendations with one click.

Meanwhile, Wanclouds'DRaaS is a reimagined approach to traditional disaster recovery strategies and eliminates the barriers for businesses seeking affordable, reliable, and compliant cloud-native data management solutions. By offering disaster recovery 'as a service', Wanclouds manages on-demand cloud backups for Kubernetes (AWS EKS, IBM IKS, IBM ROKS, Google GKE, Azure AKS or on-prem Clusters) and data as well the ability to restore them instantly when needed in the same or across regions.

To take advantage of this limited-time promotion ahead of the new year, subscribe here.