Optimizing APAC Cloud Strategy to Accelerate regions growth

Apparently and hopefully the APAC market has passed its Covid-19 driven Shallow Dip in economy due to lockdown and with markets opening there is a strong desire on both Australian government level and Private equities to accelerate growth through increased digitization . As per recent media talks by Government and Country’s Chief Scientist Dr Cathy Foley the Cloud Adoption is vital to increase public sector informed decisions to improve quality and experience for Australians

Although Cloud definitely delivers on its promise for quick ROI by virtue of Open API’s and Developer experience the hidden license and consumption model fees leads to pressure on business TCO and KPI’s as the platform stabilized .

It is always the last 10% that will be most difficult as company reaches its scale and need to Optimize its existing Apps and Infrastructure to generate value

Do we really have a cost model that can optimize the Cloud and get us rid of consumption model that only performs at scale ?

Cloud Optimization

In my last role i were appointed to conduct a huge exercise to lift applications from On-pre to the Cloud , our Infra had 300+ applications all the way from simple admin webapps to complex large Tier DB Exadata applications . The exercise lead to following reuslts

• Most applications are not cloud ready and can not be lifted to Cloud with out refactoring
• All App owners own their silo hardware and there is no uniform tools on Infrastructure monitoring and capacity optimization
• It helped us reach to conclusion just lifting everything to cloud is never going to work and may be Cloud Optimization is right approach to do including
  • Architecture for central monitoring
  • Use Inventory and Realtime data to optimize existing resource usage
  • Improved architectures to use Hardware accelerations when it outperforms commodity

Dropbox. When the company embarked on its infrastructure optimization initiative in 2016, they saved nearly $75M over two years by shifting the majority of their workloads from public cloud to “lower cost, custom-built infrastructure in co-location facilities”
source: Dropbox public information

Making right Cost equation form Hybrid Architecture

It is clear that if we can optimize the Cloud by finding a model that can help us rid of hidden costs from public clouds it can mean increased equity of at least 5% Market cap YoY which is why every CXO must analyze this

To understand this equation for a mid to large size company having cloud spend (~100M) the cost saving target from Hybrid or optimized cloud will be 50% of ~50M and 5% Cap will mean 2.5M YoY Market Cap improvements on company commitments through increase performance by cloud alone , so it is quite evident Cloud Optimization is necessary. There is no reason that we must move to cloud and keep there for religious dogma

Cooperation and not competition

Today we live in a world that value innovation more than tradition and that should continue with Cloud . For many initiatives including Edge i were often asked should we rely on on-prem vendors or hyperscalers to do it and my answer always is .

The market is too big to let one company fulfill its needs , There is due share for all

It is clear just in last year we have seen hyperscalers Amazon, Google and Microsoft that combine reaches a market cap exceeding 5Trillion have invested heavily on Telco and offerings for Cloud but how they do it obviously because they are making huge money by running their own infrastructures all the way from hardware to the Cloud ad Tools

Where the customer value is ?

There is hardly no way a customer can real Public cloud bill as the GPL and pricing are locked only way is to find the right model towards Hybrid Clouds that should be evolved as follows

• The SaaS model for whole stack all the way from Hardware to software
• The Inventory and tools that help to optimize the infrastructure vs new capacity every time
• An architecture that can live all models private , public , on-prem etc
• A migration mechanism to make workloads more portable as and when required

References

• https://www.roadsonline.com.au/budget-cracked-state-by-state-review-of-the-15-2b-infrastructure-spend/
• Budget cracked: State-by-state review of the $15.2b infrastructure spend
• https://a16z.com/2021/05/27/cost-of-cloud-paradox-market-cap-cloud-lifecycle-scale-growth-repatriation-optimization/