Since 2020, cloud adoption has grown exponentially and companies across industries utilize cloud-based applications and enjoy the flexibility that they provide . A staggering 90% of all businesses have some workload hosted in the cloud, but only 15% of total IT expenditure on average is dedicated specifically to cloud systems. Clearly, there is more room for growth which indicates a greater need for companies to further strategize their path toward full cloud adoption.
This acceleration in cloud adoption was already trending, but with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations had to quickly adapt to new business needs, both from an operational and customer-facing perspective. New dynamics created by the pandemic called for a distributed-enterprise approach to accommodate a digital, remote-first type of employee experience, while also navigating a new go-to-market strategy around the new “digital consumer” for traditionally in-person transactions.
How cloud fits
Cloud computing was and still is the natural answer to promoting confidence between both employer and employee, allowing business operations to continue uninterrupted through a remote but scalable IT environment. Additionally, customers’ demands across different industries reflected a greater demand for virtual services. Businesses responded to this demand by optimizing their cloud environments to better handle IT processes related to virtual services that could be serviced remotely from a public or private cloud platform.
Most organizations still use rigid ERP systems to conduct internal application management, which can and will suspend innovation. Technology is quickly becoming more malleable to different IT environments. This creates an opportunity for organizations to prioritize a cloud-native infrastructure for their business that can ultimately combat or remove technical debt from their balance sheets.
Cost optimization has become one of the most critical steps when implementing your migration plan as IT budgets for the first time in a decade increased by 3.6% as cloud adoption becomes more mainstream. In order to remain competitive in the growth-lead digital world, companies have been steadily progressing their investments in digital infrastructure to keep up with industry trends. This includes investing more budget into technology that is easily accessible and instantaneously scalable to avoid operational disruptions and streamline workflows for greater efficiency.
An emphasis on acceleration
According to Flexera 2022 State of the Cloud Report, 63% of companies surveyed across the globe rely heavily on cloud environments to keep organizational operations moving. Approximately 50% of those enterprise workloads and 46% data exist in the public cloud today with a projected ~7% increase within the next 12-month period. Similarly, SMBs host more than half of their critical data and workloads in the public cloud with the same increase (~7%) to be added to the existing cloud environment(s) in the coming year.
The biggest variables that organizations measure cloud progress by are the scalability and cost-savings that certain SaaS platforms can bring. Automation is used to quickly optimize spend and cloud consumption. Cost avoidance is a hot button issue in the IT world, which may lead an organization to delay cloud adoption. However, this strategy can be detrimental to your digital transformation, reducing the competitive drive the organization can bring to the cloud.
To accelerate the cloud journey, monetize legacy data center assets by assessing the current value of the devices across the data center(s) floor as workloads are lifted and shifted to their cloud-native home. This data center assessment can infuse much-needed capital back into an organization’s cloud migration project and combat the migration bubble, or what we call a double-bubble cost.
Double bubble costs
This double bubble is formed when organizations cover on-prem infrastructure costs while incurring the new costs associated with workload migrations. ReluTech helps its customers avoid overspending with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) by deploying its Elastic Maintenance solution, which helps customers avoid costly hardware IT refreshes and vendor lock-in with long-term contracts that can strain financial resources.
Not only can new hardware sourced from the OEM drain an already restricted IT budget, but OEM maintenance can also reduce the amount of working capital for cloud-committed data center equipment. Outsourced IT maintenance unlocks up to 90% cost savings compared to traditional OEM maintenance prices for server, storage, and network equipment. Additionally, the elastic contract term that accompanies the solution can be scaled up and down as AWS migration needs grow. With ReluTech’s flexible SLAs, supporting end of life (EOL) equipment well past its warranty is not only possible, but is recommended to accelerate and save budget during what could be a costly migration for your company.
The enterprise business shift from purely on-prem environments to cloud is inevitable with public cloud spending on pace to overtake traditional IT spending in 2025, almost $1.8 trillion. Disruptions in the IT market will continue to arise as new technologies and policies fall into place. Strategic change will be necessary for organizations to adapt to the new IT landscape which ideally will maximize value creation and further enhance digital capabilities.
Accelerate your cloud journey with ReluTech
Third-party maintenance services implemented early into your cloud migration plan can help your business avoid long-term contracts with OEMs and eliminate extra costs on-prem while starting to scale and spend in the cloud, avoiding the double bubble.
ReluTech offers migration gap rentals to help avoid costly on-prem capex spend to bridge the gap while running on-prem and migrating to the cloud. If you have all the on-prem gear you need to handle a lift and shift of critical applications, then ReluTech can offer asset purchase and leaseback services to provide flexible options to help fund the migration and alleviate costs associated with taking on cloud adoption efforts, whether that be funding internal resources, consulting migration partners, or AWS professional services.
Lastly, ReluTech can further assist in the cloud migration process by providing certified engineers to unplug, un-cable, data sanitize, pack, and palletize your legacy hardware whose workloads are now hosted in the cloud. This data center evacuation plan is designed to infuse more capital back into the cloud project by using assets that have been migrated and successfully wiped of all sensitive data.
Cloud-committed customers now have services that fill the gaps that often arise in cloud migration plans that they can leverage to lift and shift workloads and seamlessly continue critical business operations as usual. Keep in mind that prolonging the shift to some form of cloud adoption has the chance of making techno-centric businesses obsolete. In other words, shift with the times or shift into irrelevancy.
