The promise of IaaS savings can be elusive and not readily apparent. In fact some ISG customers question if they will really achieve any cost savings, or if adopting IaaS will be, ‘Another technology and , another vendor to support, thus driving up costs.’
In our view, those willing to invest the proper management commitment and oversight will reap cost savings over the long term. It’s all about discipline, convergence and standardization. Here’s a look at some areas where IaaS can reduce cost over the long term.
Reduced overheads and architecture costs. By carefully selecting and converging on one or a select few standard IaaS stacks, organizations will reduce the time and effort spent investigating, introducing and supporting architecture standards within their organization. Once target environments are set and committed to, applications and infrastructure architecture teams will spend less time investigating the next perfect architecture for applications and workloads. IaaS stack vendors will perform on-going Architecture standards and technical upgrades rather than in-house teams.
Reduced development costs. As organization converge on standard IaaS stacks, the IT staff will become more efficient in developing and modifying applications as they gain experience in the use of the IaaS stacks. Less time will be spent understanding, training and supporting underlying technology as the organization converges on the standardized IaaS stacks. Time, energy and effort will be saved in testing, deployments and troubleshooting along with reduced licensing, associated hardware and software, and support as technologies are retired or reduced.
Reduced lock-in costs. Many organizations question if converging on a IaaS stack will increase vendor and or stack lock-in costs. But as organizations converge on a single or small set of industry-standard IaaS stacks, future lock-in cost will decrease. Migrating 100 applications using a standard IaaS stack will be far less costly than migrating 100 applications using multiple technology stacks to a new IaaS stack or IaaS vendor. This is predicated on picking an IaaS stack based on open standards, insisting on using standard open APIs and carefully adhering to and monitoring how applications are developed so as to reduce any proprietary or custom use of technology or the stack. Organization should periodically test that applications and VMs can be ‘exported’ or moved to ensure IaaS stack use is as ‘clean’ as possible.
Reduce labor costs and greater availability of resources. By moving toward de-facto open industry IaaS stacks, organization will have an easier time obtaining lower cost resources to build and support their applications and workloads. Training and on-boarding employee costs will decrease, while choices around third parties to support the workloads will increase. With fewer architectures and technologies to support, organizations will reduce the number of employees needed to support their environments. Lower headcounts will be achieved through improved resource utilization rates since internal application development teams will have fewer skill sets to maintain.
Reduced cost for extensions and bolt-on. As the ecosystem for workloads built around industry standard IaaS stacks grows, organizations will have greater choice and less expensive options for APIs, third-party applications, and infrastructure solutions built around those IaaS stacks.
Reduced internal costs as workloads moved to community and public clouds. As organizations become more comfortable migrating selected parts of their enterprise workloads to truly shared community and public clouds, having standard IaaS stacks in place will decrease the cost of moving these workloads to those clouds. Organizations will enjoy the benefits of greater leverage and cost savings of truly shared utility environments through standardized and improved utilization of hardware, lower data center facilities unit costs, especially in leveraged mega data centers, and continuing annual price reductions in areas such as data storage and data network services.
Reduced application porting costs due to IaaS standardization. As IaaS standards continue to converge and IaaS contracts adopt more industry-standard terms and conditions, clients will have greater transaction flexibility by having shorter term contracts, which will allow clients to act on better IaaS pricing, as well as changing IaaS providers to seek improved capabilities or service.
To gain these long-term savings, keeping the utilization of IaaS stacks ‘pure’ is imperative. A strict set of architecture guidelines, standards, controls and reviews must be in place to eliminate deviations from the IaaS stack (e.g. custom APIs, unique data storage and access mechanisms, etc.) ensuring long-term cost savings. By adopting de-facto industry-standard IaaS stacks and their unadulterated APIs, careful monitoring of how well applications are engineered to use those standards, and by eliminating internal proprietary closed infrastructure stacks by converging on the selected IaaS stacks, measurable long-term savings will be achieved.
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