How Economic Uncertainty is Impacting Application Migration to the Cloud

Experts seem to be divided on whether we’re heading towards a global recession or not. In response, many business leaders are taking a conservative approach and cutting expenditures including personnel and projects. Given the strategic importance and potential expense of migrating applications to the cloud, increased scrutiny is to be expected.

But while the economic downturn has triggered some organizations to cut their staff and “tighten up the purse strings”, many IT professionals are seeing no impact to their plans to migrate to the cloud. At least according to a recent NewtonX survey of over 100 senior IT professionals across industries and functions. The survey looked to get their insight into current plans for application migration to the cloud, and the results were interesting.

While 34% of respondents are either halting or slowing down their migration plans, 43% are seeing no impact to their timelines and a surprising 24% are accelerating migration plans.

Why the rush? Probably due to shifting priorities. 80% of respondents stated that reducing operational costs is more important now than before the start of the downturn. Many organizations see cost-savings potential in the cloud, whether it’s pay-as-you-go flexibility or reduce maintenance and operating costs.

Cloud Migration Challenge: Excessive Costs

But these cost savings might be more elusive than expected. In fact, over 50% of the survey respondents stated that excessive cloud costs are one of the biggest cloud migration challenges they face. While the cloud is often seen as more cost-efficient compared to maintaining data in an on-premises datacenter, costs can get out of control if they aren’t carefully monitored.

For example, if you are “running the meter” on cloud resources 24/7, the “pay for what you use” model starts becoming less budget friendly – especially if you don’t necessarily need some of these workloads running in off-hours. Or if your team takes a lot of snapshots or copies of data for Dev/Test purposes and then forget to spin them down when they are no longer in use.

Another way you can find yourself overspending on the cloud is by trying to achieve higher levels of performance. In the cloud, the faster the performance you want, the more cloud resources you need to buy. This overprovisioning is financially untenable and should only be used for short-term performance emergencies. By the way, if you overprovision on databases in the cloud, you might need to pay for a license for each cloud vCPU – another hit to the wallet.

How Priceline Overcame Cloud Migration Challenges with Silk

One organization that had to deal with cost challenges in the cloud was Priceline. Priceline is a world leader in travels deals, offering exclusive discounts on hotels, flights, rental cars, cruises, and travel packages. It strives to provide a great online customer experience, which is why its IT team decided to migrate its applications to Google Cloud. Google Cloud would make it easy to quickly deploy new code and spin up infrastructure to enhance the website, without the overhead that comes from maintaining on-prem infrastructure. Priceline wanted to be sure that it would be able to achieve the highest level of performance possible on Google Cloud… while keeping their cloud budget under control.

By introducing the Silk Cloud Data Virtualization Platform to its cloud stack, Priceline was able to boost its performance dramatically and cut back on costly overprovisioning to achieve this level of performance.