If you’ve been operating in the cloud for some time now, chances are your business has changed since you first made that move. Has your cloud usage grown considerably—and your OpEx costs? Is that just the cost of doing business in the cloud? It doesn’t have to be. Here’s how you can rationalize your infrastructure and determine if there are cloud expenses you can reclaim and even if it makes sense to move some of your cloud deployments into co-location.

No matter what’s driving your move to an AWS or Azure cloud, two things are true. One, you don’t want to under-provision, which could create performance and availability issues. And two, you don’t want to overpay, because no one ever wants to do that. One of the key decisions you must make is which Amazon EC2 or Microsoft Azure virtual machine instance configuration you need. It’s a scoping exercise, but several factors make this easier said than done.

Moving applications to a public cloud, no matter why you’re making that journey, is a high-stakes proposition. As an industry, we’re focused on rapidly moving forward to give our businesses the competitive edge they need. However, when it comes to cloud migration, we often fail to stop and ask some critical questions, and as a result we end up overspending and underperforming.

When mission-critical applications were all implemented within your data center, capacity management seemed easy – Most organizations deployed infrastructure sets (compute, network, and storage) to meet their 95 to 99% capacity requirement. For a retailer, that might mean planning around a “Black Friday” date (Cyber-Monday wasn’t around then). For a bank or a manufacturer using ERP or financial systems, this might instead be the end of year close.

January 30, 2020 As a healthcare CIO mandated with the transition to electronic healthcare records, you’ve done your due diligence, evaluated various EHR vendors and most likely settled on Epic, a software vendor with over 25% of the US acute care hospital market share. You’ve followed Epic guidelines for minimum hardware requirements and acquired what you believe is the right workstation, server, networking, and storage infrastructure for Epic.

January 29, 2020 It’s well known that within large IT datacenters, specialists in different domains (i.e. application, DB, networking, storage, etc) often struggle with sharing tools to solve problems. Vendors produce tools that may give a deep view of one domain, but lack correlation with others.

December 12, 2019 It’s a perfect storm: infrastructure silos, increasing volumes of data, growing hybrid infrastructures, and mounting anomalies can bring down enterprise applications, or at least compromise availability or performance. These forces in combination have already outstripped the human capacity and intuition to solve infrastructure issues – which may occur routinely or unpredictably.

I set out on the road to Boston a few weeks ago to meet with our ever-growing ecosystem of partners and customers. I’m always looking to have interesting conversations in the field that will help drive our go-to-market strategy and engage our partners in driving value to their own bottom line. My energy was uniquely high during this trip due to our recent rebrand from “Virtual Instruments” to “Virtana” and the launch of our latest product offering, CloudWisdom.