According to a recent McKinsey study, legacy systems account for 74% of a company’s IT spend while hampering agility at the same time. Making fundamental IT changes like migrating on-premises workloads to the cloud can reduce costs, increase agility, and pay ROI dividends down the line. For most businesses, strategies are not all about cost-cutting. They would like to be in a position where they can monitor both costs and the operational efficiency of the in house teams, knowing which projects to prioritize for ensuring longevity.
Google Cloud, which has grown to become a key player in the cloud market, has few recommendations on how to leverage cloud for improved performance.
Using Cloud-Native Tools
New container-based “cloud-native” tools and services have emerged to offer agility and flexibility, but enterprises need solutions from a trusted company that truly understands these technologies.
Google’s Anthos is one such application built for hybrid and multi-cloud environments. It includes a packaged and integrated set of cloud-native tools and services based on leading open source technologies that aim to simplify and accelerate app modernization both on-premises and in public clouds. Google claims that its Anthos service can help cut licensing and training costs and increase development speed and the efficiency of the operations teams.
Migrating From VMs To Cloud
Migration is not just moving applications, it’s moving disaster recovery, backup, changes in security policies, monitoring, and more. But the process of migrating VMs can be daunting.
Using Google Cloud VMware Engine one can migrate if they want to purely lift and shift the VMware VMs. Users can run VMware natively in the cloud, just like they do with on-premises.
For those looking to migrate their VMs and run them directly in Google Compute Engine, they can leverage Migrate for Compute Engine, a product available at no additional cost, which can migrate VMs from on-premises or other clouds directly into Compute Engine.
Google Cloud’s virtual machines are billed on a per-second basis with no up-front costs or termination fees, saving more even as the needs grow.
Tweak Your Data Warehousing Strategy
Legacy data warehouses such as Teradata, built for a batch processing paradigm, were not designed to handle today’s explosive data growth, and are not optimized to run advanced analytics or scale quickly and efficiently. They’re also extremely expensive to purchase and maintain, and easily run out of capacity, leaving them unable to keep up with increased business analytics demands. Data warehouse modernization allows users to solve for today's growing analytics needs by increasing agility and efficiency with serverless analytics — all at a lower cost.
Cloud data warehouses such as BigQuery can help customers make smarter, informed decisions and improve business operations. And the rest of Google Cloud’s smart analytics platform makes it easy to ingest data from various sources in the most cost-efficient way for businesses — it also provides easy access to advanced analytics through AI and machine learning.
Leveraging Apache Hadoop Via Cloud
Google says that using Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark requires a careful balancing act between cost, complexity, scale, and utilization. So, users can deviate from important processes. Google's Dataproc manages Apache Spark and Hadoop cloud service and balances cost and flexibility. According to ESG research, hosting the same data using Dataproc is 57% less expensive than using on-premises servers.
Running Specialised Workloads
Though migration is a challenge in itself, another key aspect to remember while migrating is that the legacy applications were not designed to run in the cloud. To tackle this, Google Cloud introduced Bare Metal Solution that consists of all the infrastructure one needs to run their specialized workload, such as Oracle Database, close to Google Cloud.
Google says that by deploying Oracle workloads on Bare Metal Solution, customers can reduce up to 50% of their licensing cost compared to other public cloud vendors. The hardware for Bare Metal Solution is located in a colocation facility close to a Google data centre. Therefore, customers can continue to pay the same on-premises licensing costs rather than cloud licensing costs and leverage cloud-like features such as no upfront hardware investment.
Control The Billing
Post-migration to the cloud, it is handy to have a complete picture of the costs. Google Cloud's no-cost billing and cost management tools provide the visibility and insights where one can get an at-a-glance view of costs, and use labels to attribute costs back to departments or teams. Users can build their own custom dashboards to closely monitor cost trends and forecast them over time, to reduce the risk of overspending.
Apart from the aforementioned solutions, Google flaunts multiple other tools from advanced analytics for improving team connectivity. Today, not only Google but other top cloud platforms are offering top-notch AI services, where users can derive insights on the go. The ongoing situation around the world will further accelerate the exodus of organisations towards cloud platforms and these top cloud platforms are well-positioned to retain all those who are willing to migrate from legacy systems.
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