How Cloud Cost Efficiency Can Help Malaysian Organisations Maximise Business Value
For Organisations to Make the Most of Their Cloud Investments, They Need to Know If Cloud-Aware, Cloud-Mature, or Cloud-Fluent
In Malaysia, speed is not the only factor customers consider when booking an e-hailing ride to their destinations; they also consider the cost efficiency of the ride vis-a-vis other transport modes, as well as the safety of the driver. In the world of cloud platforms, cloud cost efficiency should be similarly prioritised by business users.
The potential of cloud technology to drive digital transformation and business growth in Malaysia has been underscored by the announcement of Microsoft investing USD $2.2 billion to fuel Malaysia’s cloud and Artificial Intelligence (AI) transformation. The investment includes building digital infrastructure, creating AI skilling opportunities, establishing a national AI Centre of Excellence, and enhancing the nation’s cybersecurity capabilities to support its productivity, competitiveness, resilience, and economic growth.
However, for organisations to make the most of their cloud investments, they need to be aware that there are three categories that every cloud-using organisation falls into, and each organisation should be able to identify the category it is in. These categories comprise being cloud-aware, cloud-mature, and cloud-fluent.
The Lifting-and-Shifting Method of Migration
Cloud-aware organisations perceive the cloud as just another traditional data centre, where their applications are migrated before being significantly modernised. This approach might be a quicker way to adopt cloud services but is not always economical as the services’ potential benefits are restricted.
In an attempt to avoid overprovisioning and wasted resources, cloud-aware companies prioritise right-sizing server instances by driving down the cost per compute resource. They tend to focus on discount negotiations through reserved instances, spot instances, savings plans, and enterprise discount programmes.
By committing to specific consumption levels, they can obtain cost savings (and cloud cost efficiency, to a certain extent). However, because they do not fully leverage the native capabilities of the cloud, such as elasticity and on-demand scaling, their cost optimisation potential is limited compared to more cloud-native companies.
Advanced Adoption of Cloud-Native Technologies
Cloud-mature organisations demonstrate adeptness in benefiting from cloud-native technologies for increased financial savings. They use architectural enhancements like serverless components such as application programming interface (API) gateways to improve agility and development and operations (DevOps) methodologies to accelerate capability delivery.
These organisations capitalise on automation and DevOps to actively manage cloud computing resources, harnessing the on-demand and auto-scaling features. These optimisation strategies eliminate idle resources on the cloud, create just-in-time environments for testing feature-specific applications, and implement automatic budget enforcement. By aligning expenditures with business needs and maximising resource utilisation, cloud-mature companies avoid unnecessary costs and boost overall operational efficiency (thus achieving a semblance of cloud cost efficiency).
Maximising Cloud Potential for Ultimate Cloud Cost Efficiency
Companies well-versed in cloud operations are known as cloud-fluent as they have their fair share of market experience and are utilising the product to its maximum potential. These cloud-fluent organisations often implement Financial DevOps (FinOps) practices, aligning resource allocation with business requirements.
By adhering to this model, businesses can reduce cloud spending by tracking their return on investment of cloud expenses and efficiently optimising resources. Expenditure monitoring dashboards provide the data required to make such business evaluations to minimise cloud infrastructure costs while maximising overall business value (and ensuring cloud cost efficiency).
Powering the Future of Businesses with the Cloud
With growing cloud-based solutions and competence in computing technology, organisations can unlock the opportunities to optimise costs and amplify business value. Beyond improved cost efficiency, companies gain enhanced computing power for applications such as generative AI by evolving their architecture, procedures, and governance to fully leverage the flexibility and scalability offered by cloud services.
