Our Biggest Managed Cloud Services Lesson

Over our 11 years of experience supporting and managing cloud environments for businesses of all shapes and sizes, we’ve learned plenty of valuable lessons.

Perhaps the biggest lesson we’ve learned in recent years is the importance of helping our clients and partners understanding the nature of their cloud investments.

We often work with businesses who make the mistake of simply putting their credit card details into the AWS or Azure portal, and expecting everything to run smoothly with no further action.

Unfortunately, making this mistake tends to have a serious negative impact from a financial perspective.

Why? Well, the cloud is always changing and evolving, and that applies to your own deployment too. A cloud investment is nothing like a traditional enterprise IT product. It’s not something you can just turn on and leave to run itself.

Without the traditional fixed-cost model associated with IT hardware, and even out-the-box software, the cloud’s flexibility and scalability will produce fluctuating costs each month.

Delivering business-critical applications and services via the cloud, then, requires almost constant maintenance and management. It’s crucial to appreciate that this is a different concept to your legacy IT systems if you’re to gain the desired ROI.

When approaching a cloud investment, the first step you should take is acknowledging the need to commit significant time and effort into your own implementation. Cloud isn’t just a single one-off purchase, nor is it a project that can be given just a one-time forecast of annual costs.

When your business grows and changes, so too will the usage, and the cost, of the cloud infrastructure that supports it. This is where the need for support from the right processes and automation tools becomes not just valuable, but essential to success.

If you’d like to gain further understanding of how to achieve efficient and cost-effective maintenance of your cloud deployments, check out our latest guide here.