Making the transition to a hybrid Cloud environment is not easy. If your organization has run into difficulties, I assure you that you are not alone. On a daily basis, I talk with very smart and focused individuals who are somewhere in the middle of their cloud journey. Many of them tell me they’ve run into unique and unexpected obstacles that lead to a lot of root-cause analysis.

An increase in overall spending is frequently a key indicator that something is wrong or not going as planned or scripted. Moving to the cloud rarely delivers immediate cost savings. But if your costs start increasing significantly, then now is the time to identify and address the issues, as they won’t go away on their own.

Another obvious indicator is server sprawl. Here’s a familiar scenario: A team decides to migrate a workload to a public cloud and stands up a virtual machine (VM) through a cloud provider. But the performance is disappointing for one reason or another (zone, latency, type of storage, and so on). So, the team works with the cloud provider and then tries again, creating a fresh VM. But the team never takes down the initial VM. Simply put, in an onesie-twosie situation, operating and running one too many VMs is generally not a huge issue. But if that happens 10, 20, or hundreds of times, costs add up quickly and budgets get depleted.

Here’s another scenario: You have multiple groups within your organization that are requesting resources directly from a public cloud provider. They buy more than they need and leave resources unutilized, even though they could have shared those resources with other groups. The result is excessive spending.

Whether sprawl or some other issue is at the heart of your problems, it’s time to make a change.  But where do you start?

1. Admit That There Is Indeed a Problem

The first step in overcoming your problem is admitting you have one. You might need to swallow your pride. Accept the possibility that you might have done a few things differently. And be open to making adjustments to your strategy. Most importantly, be willing to speak to experts who can help you. Admitting there is a problem is not a sign of weakness—rather an indicator of strength and ownership.

2. Get a Fresh Perspective

Often the best way to address the issues you’re encountering is to get a fresh perspective, preferably with the help of an outside team. Work with experts who have been through the cloud journey numerous times. The right consulting partner can provide insights that you might not have considered. Find a consultant who does not require a specific solution. Your business is yours. Your consultant should offer a fresh perspective that will meet your needs and goals.

3. Evaluate Your Progress So Far

Where did you start your journey to the cloud? What were your objectives? Have you achieved at least some of the goals you set for your team? For example, maybe you’ve improved your ability to deliver new resources to users faster, but you want to accelerate your return on investment.

An outside team can also help you drill down on the technical strategies, figuring out what has worked and what hasn’t. Maybe you tried one particular approach to application delivery that now doesn’t seem like such a great fit for your company. At the end of the day, you may not feel like you have made progress, but you more than likely have. It is just hard to see in the eye of the storm. If you want to recalibrate, evaluate, and determine whether you are on the track for what meets your target objectives, getting a non-biased perspective from peers, local groups, or a consultant might be the best approach.

4. Refine Your Strategy

Once you’ve figured out where you are in your cloud journey, it’s time to redefine where you want to go. Is the cloud your ultimate goal, or is it just a means to an end? Many might think the cloud is the ultimate goal, but the goals are really to optimize the budget, improve resource allocation, or extend the lifecycle of critical applications. You might have set off toward the cloud so you could enhance agility, increase flexibility, improve efficiency, or shift your cost model from CapEx to OpEx spending. But a public or private cloud might be just part of the solution.

Redefining where you want to go is a huge step in the right direction. You can reset your course for getting to your destination. With the right consulting help and calibration, you can quickly consider a wide range of technical approaches that might be better aligned with your goals.

5. Dive into the Details

With your strategy refined, you can dive into the details and start crafting your solution. Maybe you learned that a container-based approach on one public cloud platform was not the right fit for your team. You might now decide to employ a serverless model on a different cloud platform.

You might decide to implement a new approach to management. If you’ve discovered that managing a multi-cloud environment on your own is more than you can handle, you could adopt managed cloud services to take some—or all—of that administration off your hands.

Address Your Issues Head-on with CenturyLink

CenturyLink can help you work through the problems you’ve encountered on your cloud journey. Our teams have extensive experience helping organizations to identify issues, reset their strategies, and refine the solutions that will help them reach their goals.

We recognize that CenturyLink might be only one of the vendors you’ll need to engage to accomplish your objectives. We live in a collaborative era, and we want to facilitate that collaboration for your cloud journey. We can draw on a large partner ecosystem to help you build the right solution, whether you choose public cloud services from Amazon or Microsoft; a new virtualized environment built on VMware, Cisco, and Dell EMC; or a managed private cloud service from CenturyLink.

Ready to learn more? Visit our website.

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