DP Q3FY20 There is a Right Way to Go "All-in" on the Cloud

Quest Software, Inc. Executive White Paper best practices a company puts in place on-premises as it prepares to migrate its applications to the cloud will largely persist once its applications reside in the cloud. While a company may have used policies like this to some degree when hosting VMs on-premises, its reasons for doing so were largely technical. For instance, a company may move a VM or VMs from one host to another for improved availability or performance. However, the financial angle was not always a primary motivation since the company already owned the hardware on which these VMs ran. A company needs to view the cloud differently. The cloud does more than give a company the freedom to manage where an application resides in the cloud or how the company uses the cloud’s resources. Cloud providers reward a company for optimizing how its applications utilize the resources in the cloud. Perhaps more important to keep in mind, cloud providers will penalize a company that fails to do so. To reap the rewards the cloud has to offer, a company should seek to deploy software that monitors each of its application’s usage of cloud resources. The software should then also analyze and make recommendations as to how the company can optimize each application’s usage of these resources. A company needs to grasp that the meter is always on once it moves its applications to the cloud. The better that a company understands how its applications use these cloud resources, when these applications use them, and if they use them, the better a company can manage and optimize each application’s usage of them. This understanding will, in turn, help the company better control its cloud costs initially and over time. To put this best practice into motion requires that a company select the right software that helps it optimize its usage of cloud resources and control its cloud costs. To achieve this end, a company needs software that possesses the following three key attributes. 1. Monitors each application’s usage of the cloud resources. This software should mimic what occurs when monitoring and assessing applications on-premises. It should minimally monitor and track each application’s CPU, memory, and storage usage, when its periods of peak usage are, and what data protection policies, if any, it should apply to protect and recover the application and its data. 2. Analyzes and makes recommendations on optimizing the application’s usage of the cloud’s available resources. Once deployed in the cloud, applications are not static as their usage of cloud resources may decrease or increase over time. Applications will also have periods when they are busy, idle, relatively inactive, or experience periods of peak activity. It behooves a company to have software that can monitor and understand the application’s activity and make recommendations on how to optimize its placement in the cloud during each one of these activity periods. A simple example is if a company initially deploys an application on an on-demand VM hosted in the cloud that is CPU and memory intensive. This VM could hypothetically cost five dollars an hour to operate. However, the software may determine that the VM only needs these resources one hour a day. The application should flag that application and make recommendations on how a company can optimize the deployment of that application in the cloud. These recommendations may include shutting the VM down for the other 23 hours; moving it to a lower performing, lower cost VM for those hours; or, hosting the VM on a reserved or spot instance in the cloud. “As a company goes ‘all-in’ on the cloud, it should also prepare to go ‘all-in’ on optimizing the applications it hosts in the cloud.” Due to the large number of existing and changing variables associated with the cloud and each application, the software needs to constantly monitor all these variables as these variables far exceed what any individual or even a team of individuals could analyze on their own. The software should provide guidance and even prioritize which applications a company should optimize first. 3. Works both on-premises and in the cloud. Using the same software to manage applications in the cloud and on-premises becomes almost a necessity. Aside from the obvious benefit of providing a company with a single pane of glass to manage its hybrid environment, a company will also want the software to advise it on when or if to move its applications from on-premises to the cloud and vice versa. Using this software, a company can build the justifications it needs as to where to host its applications and when to host them there. Building these business cases only becomes possible when the software spans both on-premises and cloud environments. © 2018 DCIG, LLC. All rights reserved. DCIG: Empowering the IT industry with actionable analysis.™limited and unrestricted distribution rights. December 2018 3 Quest Software, Inc. Executive White Paper Go “All-in” on the Cloud… Just Do it the Right Way Report after report is coming out about companies going “all-in” on the cloud in large part because more companies than ever see the benefits the cloud offers. But as a company goes “all-in” on the cloud, it should also prepare to go “all-in” on optimizing the applications that it hosts in the cloud. This requires that it implement software such as Quest Software’s Foglight. This software does more than monitor and track each application’s usage of resources in the cloud. It spans both on-premises and cloud environments to provide a company with a holistic view into its applications regardless of where they reside. In so doing, it helps a company know which applications it should keep on-premises, which ones it should move to the cloud, and which ones it should consider moving back on-premises. It also gives a company the information and analytics it needs to optimize each of its application’s usage of cloud resources while laying the foundation to automate these cloud optimization activities in the future. Companies have good reason for wanting to go “all-in” on the cloud as part of their overall business and IT strategies. But integral to both these strategies, a company must also have a means to ensure the stability of this new hybrid cloud environment as well as provide assurances that its cloud costs will be managed and controlled over time. By going “all-in” on software such as Quest Software’s Foglight, a company can have confidence that its decision to go “all-in” on the cloud will succeed initially and then continue to pay-off over time. About DCIG DCIG empowers the IT industry with actionable analysis that equips individuals within organizations to conduct technology assessments. DCIG delivers informed, insightful, third party analysis and commentary on IT technology. DCIG independently develops and licenses access to DCIG Buyer’s Guides and the DCIG Competitive Intelligence Platform. It also develops sponsored content in the form of blog entries, executive white papers, podcasts, special reports, webinars, white papers, and videos. More information is available at www.dcig.com. 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