In this Digital Leaders community session, we had experts from Nutanix and IDC Metri on hand to share their expertise with the community.
The interactive session started as usual with a presentation of the reasons why the participants from the community joined. There was a variety of interest among digital leaders across Europe, including one company making the decision to move to the cloud, some having plans based on the maturity of different workloads and others wanting to hear from colleagues who have already moved in the cloud
A public organization told how it became fully cloud-based. Did it save money? The participant commented on the need to ensure that the CFO and finance team understood that operations would grow. We need to ensure that finance also sees the savings. They talked about no longer needing data centers so the space could be used as offices. It concluded that FinOps is complicated, but mostly important because it’s hard to forecast costs as more people move to the cloud.
Nutanix has many customers moving to the cloud and is seeing how cloud costs have evolved for customers. Nutanix expert Steen Dalgas, in particular, has helped companies figure out the TCO of cloud and other environments. Cloud is great for companies in innovation/growth mode — to rent capacity when you don’t know which parts will work. It is better to keep the mature areas at the headquarters because it is much more cost effective.
You can compare it to on-premises with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Platform as a Service (PaaS) is quite different and hard to compare to on-premises. It is also extremely difficult to repatriate from PaaS. Most cloud usage now is IaaS, but PaaS will start to become more dominant.
A word of caution – participants overwhelmingly agreed that “By moving to the cloud, you don’t get rid of your problems, you just move them somewhere else.“
A discussion on cloud related skills followed. One participant noted that they outsource the skills they need to core providers. Some people feel more secure in the cloud than on-premises. However, the cloud gives people an opportunity to be lazy – sloppy code with data leaks was an example – this is an on-premises problem that in the cloud can become very expensive very quickly.
There is a major demand for FinOps – managing different environments, deciding which workloads to use in which environment. And this is a key skill along with internal cloud governance software skills; what cloud users buy on company credit cards can be significant if they don’t understand the issues around variable costs and security.
The meeting discussed whether you could ban people from using the cloud or do you educate people about the costs and let them get on with their work? You have to monitor cloud invoices very closely, educate people and you need people with knowledge of cloud biz models. There is always a need to ask a lot of questions about the cloud bill and figure out what is going on inside.
One suggestion was that business people need to be aware that what they do costs money. Ideally, ensure that costs are passed directly to users. This can be done by tagging cloud resources with an application name, environment name, or resource tag so you know who is using what and how much it costs. One comment was that unfortunately sometimes even IT doesn’t know how the cloud business model works.