At a Glance
The success of your cloud strategy is measured through cost control, performance, security, compliance, and business alignment. Regular audits, right-sizing resources, cloud-native adoption, and productivity tracking are ways to build the success of your cloud strategy and maximise the cloud’s long-term value.
The Success of Your Cloud Strategy
After creating a robust cloud strategy and implementing it successfully, the next step is to measure the impact. However, with no fixed formula or a set of metrics to guide the evaluation, how do you measure if your cloud strategy is working?
This is because success in the cloud can vary from one workload to the next. The cloud’s successful impact on your business depends on various factors, from managing costs to keeping your strategy aligned with your business’ goals. Not measuring your cloud strategy’s success can amount to overlooking underperformance or wasted investment.
In this guide, we explore the ways you can measure the impact and success of your business’ cloud hosting strategy.
Managing Cloud Costs
Businesses choose to switch to the cloud because it helps them save costs and increase resource-efficiency. However, without proper management, cloud costs can quickly spiral out of control.
While the cloud brings in flexibility, it can also be complex to understand, which can lead to overspending with cloud providers.
This is why it’s important to regularly monitor and optimise your cloud needs, to stay in line with your cloud budgets, and pay only for what you need.
Let’s explore where to start when cutting costs and beginning to rein in cloud overspend, and cut out waste by matching cloud use precisely to what your business needs.
Analyse Pricing Models and Costs
Before moving to the cloud, understand how your provider charges for cloud services.
The pay-as-you-go model bills you for the resources you use, such as power, storage, and bandwidth, which can lead to unexpected expenses before you realise it.
It’s worth exploring providers such as BlackBox Hosting with pricing options like fixed costs and transparent pricing plans that help you optimise your cloud costs.
Right-Size Your Resources
Make sure your business is using the right capacity of resources. Too much can lead to wasted investment, while too little can affect performance and outcomes.
Monitoring your usage data and using auto-scaling features that adjust resources automatically based on your demand helps you avoid underprovisioning and overprovisioning.
Adopt a Cloud-Native Approach
A cloud-native architecture consists of core technologies such as microservices, containers, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), and DevOps services that maximise a cloud’s elasticity and flexibility potentials.
Not only does this approach reduce costs and resource usage, but it also supports rapid development and results in cost-effective operations.
Cost Allocation and Tagging
Cost allocation and tagging allow you to track spending by department or project, understanding where money is going and identifying areas where you may be overspending.
For example, if one of your teams is using more storage than expected, you can find ways to optimise.
Use Cost Management Tools
Cost management tools help you to track usage and optimise costs, alerting you when you’re nearing your budget limits. You can rely on your provider’s built-in monitoring system or third-party tools for managing cloud costs.
Optimise Storage Costs
Leaving old or rarely accessed data in high-cost storage tiers can quickly add up costs unexpectedly. It’s recommended to clean up unnecessary data and automate the process.
Audit Your Cloud Setup Regularly
Regular audits of your cloud usage can keep your costs in check. Audits can help you identify inefficiencies, unused resources, or services you can downsize or eliminate. Compare your usage against your budget to catch unexpected spikes early.
Evaluating Cloud Strategy Effectiveness
Once your enterprise cloud strategy is in place, regular evaluations can quickly identify gaps and adjust as needed.
Key evaluation metrics include:
- Cost Efficiency: Track overspending or underutilisation of cloud resources to check whether you’re staying within your cloud budget.
- Performance and Scalability: Monitor uptime, latency, and overall system health to make sure your cloud services can handle growing workloads without any hassles.
- Security: Assess data protection, identity management, and access control regularly. Periodic security audits will help spot vulnerabilities.
- Compliance Status: Make sure your business, particularly if it’s in a highly regulated industry like healthcare or finance, is compliant with industry regulations through regular audits.
Align Cloud Strategy with Business Objectives
Make sure your cloud hosting strategy supports your broader business objectives. Whether you’re improving efficiency, enhancing customer experience or scaling up, your cloud investments need to be in sync with your organisation’s objectives.
- Revisit your cloud strategy and check if it’s in line with your goals
- Involve leadership in strategy reviews to make sure investments are in line with your business’ priorities
- Update your strategy as goals evolve or new opportunities develop
Managing Risks and Meeting Compliance
As cloud environments grow, it’s vital to manage potential risks like security threats, compliance issues, or unexpected costs.
Set protocols for:
- Assessing Risks: Regularly evaluate risks such as data breaches, outages, or compliance failures. Develop plans to address these risks proactively.
- Recovering from Disasters: Have backup plans and disaster recovery strategies in place to minimise downtime during service interruptions or data loss.
- Data Privacy Laws: Understand the privacy laws that affect your industry and how they apply to cloud services.
Assessing Productivity and Agility
Shifting to the cloud can help your teams get things done more quickly by making workloads more accessible and manageable. To evaluate whether the cloud creates this value, identify these factors:
- The total application downtime
- How many support tickets are there due to challenges accessing workloads and services?
- How long does it take the IT team to fulfil requests, like setting up a new app?
- How long does it take on average to close out tickets?
To check whether your business’ agility and innovation ability improved after adopting a cloud strategy, evaluate:
- How quickly can developers complete and deploy new applications into production?
- How much time do your engineers spend on building new features or implementing optimisations, as opposed to performing maintenance work?
Maximise The Cloud’s Impact on Your Business with BlackBox Hosting
Measuring the success of your cloud strategy depends on a complex set of factors. From increasing your resilience towards risks to optimising the resources you use, a well-executed cloud strategy has far-reaching effects that can’t be overlooked.
At BlackBox Hosting, we’re committed to building cloud success stories by supporting your strategies with our enterprise-grade private cloud hosting services.
Our clients rely on us for:
- 100% customer-focused approach
- Enterprise-grade tier 3+ UK infrastructure
- Fully UK‑based infrastructure ensuring data sovereignty
- Robust security measures, including DDoS mitigation, Fortinet next-gen firewalls, intrusion detection/prevention, WAF, and Veeam-backed DR with 1‑second RPO
- Transparent pricing plans
Contact us today to be a part of the next BlackBox Hosting cloud success story.
