Optimize Cloud Spend for Greater MSP Success

More than 66% enterprises expect cloud migration to reduce overall IT operating costs. But only 37% of companies surveyed by Accenture, a consultancy, said they were getting the full values as they expected from the cloud (See note 1). A recent market research survey reported that at the US and UK markets, only 38% of enterprises using the “lift and shift” approach for cloud migration can see cost reduction and majority of them seeing cost increase. The success rate of cost reduction after cloud migration should be much lower in non-cloud-first markets like China because most projects are done without proper cost planning and optimization in mind. 

Why it is so difficult to achieve the cost reduction goal during and after cloud migration?  

The lack of Purpose-built Tooling to Support Multi-cloud Cost Management is the Most Foundational Problem

This easily leads to the underestimate of the resources required at the cloud, causing costs to spiral out of control in cloud migration. Without the right tool for cost tracking, it is very difficult to find out low-utilized and unused cloud resources, and is hard to rightsize cloud resources, generating a lot of unnecessary cost. 

Even though there are good western tools such as CloudHealth or CloudCheckr which can support well for AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, their supports to China-based cloud platforms are not as satisfactory as their support to western clouds. But in Asia Pacific and the greater China regions, the inclusion to support tier-1 China-based clouds is very important for cloud Managed Service Providers (MSPs). 

Hyperscale clouds’ cost management native tools are great in providing fundamental functions but deliver minimal features outside of their platforms, leading to the difficulty for multi-cloud cost management. Furthermore, cloud providers’ conflict of interests in providing tools that make cloud consumers spend less money at their platforms is another reason.  As Brain & Company, a consultancy, said “calculating a financial business case for cloud is exceptionally hard, but the calculators on cloud provider websites make it seem simple”. (See note 1)

The Developing of Skillsets in Public Cloud Governance and Cost Management is Another Major Issue for Cloud MSPs

To help end users reduce their cloud bill significantly, cloud MSPs must have complex skills to implement a cloud governance and cost containment framework for their clients. This includes how to implement a resource tagging strategy to have deep visibility about cloud cost and track them when needed, how to assign cost management responsibilities to internal users at clients’ organizations, how to define fit-to-purpose architecture for migrating applications, etc. 

OnePro Cloud sees many cloud MSPs are short of such skillsets, especially lacking skills for native tools from China-based cloud platforms such as Alibaba Cloud, Huawei Cloud and Tencent Cloud. 

The Multi-Cloud Requirements Add Even Further Difficulty for Cloud MSPs 

Most cloud MSPs are in the journey to support multi-cloud computing as their customers are moving toward that direction. In different regions of the world, the combination of multiple public cloud platforms is different. In Asia Pacific and the Greater China regions, the inclusion to support tier-1 China-based hyperscale clouds together with their western peers is important for cloud MSPs.  

However, having a team in-house to learn various native tools from Western and Chinese hyperscale clouds are difficult for most cloud MSPs. They need a unified tooling platform to implement consistent cost management policies across different clouds they support, abstracting the various difference such as APIs, naming convention of Tags, functionality gaps in different cloud platforms. 

How OnePro Cloud Can Help Cloud MSPs for Cost Management?

OnePro Cloud is positioning itself as the MSP of cloud MSPs, aiming to fill their capability gaps. Cloud cost management is a key area for OnePro Cloud together with other areas like cloud migration and management. HyperOne™ together with Cloud Broker Deck is the integrated tooling platform for cloud cost management. Figure 1 gives a high-level view of this tool. 

Provide Cloud Cost Management Platform – HyperOne™ With Cloud Broker Deck

HyperOne™ is OnePro Cloud’s next generation tooling platform, targeting for hybrid, multicloud service and cost management. Cloud Broker Deck is OnePro Cloud’s add-on tool for multi-cloud cost management. With these two tools together, they can deliver comprehensive functions on cloud service and cost management to cloud MSPs and their clients. HyperOne™ is built with the mindset of leveraging the native tools of hyperscale clouds as much as possible. It adds a layer between cloud MSPs and hyperscale cloud platforms to abstract their complexity and complement their functionality gaps, providing unified views and management across multiple hyperscale cloud platforms. There are couple functional components of such combined tools and its functions are still growing. 

Plan – this is mainly to provide a tool for cloud cost planning, such as cost estimation, forecast consumption, and budget building. It includes defining cloud service requirements, selecting cloud services with cost in mind to fulfill requirements, choosing the right pricing models, forecast usage and budget planning. Many hyperscale cloud native tools have some of such functions targeting for end users, but not in a comprehensive way and not build for cloud MSPs. 

Track – this is a very important component for cost tracking. End users want to correlate cloud costs to business KPIs, allowing organizations to manage spending in respect to its Return of Investment. Also, they want to have deep visibility on cloud spend by implementing self-defined cost tracking strategy to charge back or show back respective cost to their business units. Cloud cost management is a developing area at hyperscale clouds. For example, not every cloud service supports tagging and native tools’ support to user-defined values are varying. The cross-cloud naming difference is very annoying for cloud MSPs. Thus, using their native tools without a purpose-built third-party tool to complement their functional gap in cost tracking cannot meet cloud MSPs’ business requirements.

Optimize – this is to manage and reduce cloud cost. Cloud MSPs need to identify unused or low-utilized resources and dispose them to reduce waste. It is too easy to provision resources at cloud platforms, making such unaware waste is very common. Using resource management, anomalies detection and analytic functions at HyperOne™ and Cloud Broker Deck, it is straightforward for cloud MSPs to identify waste and optimize cost for their clients. Furthermore, rightsizing resources is another area that can bring in cost efficiency for end users. This requires the analysis of cloud resources consumption pattern to rightsize resources for cost containment. The resource monitoring and analytic functions at HyperOne™ collect utilization data from hyperscale cloud native tools via related APIs, compare the actual utilization with the provisioned capacity, and report the result at its dashboard. Cloud MSPs can leverage such function to conduct periodical upsize or downsize of resources to achieve cost containment goals for their clients. Besides these, Cloud Broker Deck supports discount management such as negotiated discounts and programmatic discounts. Cloud MSPs can leverage this feature to deliver cost-based workload placement strategies for their clients, significantly reducing cloud cost. 

Improve – this function is specifically designed for cloud MSPs to adopt third-party tooling within the OnePro Cloud ecosystem. HyperOne™ is the tooling platform will continue integrating with the co-created or partner-developed tools, providing unified view of cloud cost and service management to cloud MSPs, even if they adopt third-party cost management tools. This can save a lot of time for cloud MSPs to develop proprietary extensions and integrate with different new tools. Furthermore, Cloud Broker Deck provides explore function to cloud MSPs when they want to search third-party tools and offerings within the OnePro Cloud ecosystem. 

Ecosystem – this is for cloud MSPs’ channel sales management because they are involved in the re-selling hyperscale cloud services and/or the re-distributing of their own cloud services. It can even support customized format for invoices based on channel partners’ requirements. This function is very useful for large size cloud MSPs such as carriers and large system integrators who aiming to build their ecosystem of partners. This is a quite differentiating feature at Cloud Broker Deck because OnePro Cloud involves in a lot of cases to support large size cloud MSPs and found they have such requirements. This function is going to be evolved to include more ecosystem support features. 

Deliver Cloud Cost Management Expertise as Enablement Services for Cloud MSPs 

In real world, the cost management requires a lot of real-life expertise for cloud MSPs. OnePro Cloud can not only provide its multi-cloud service and cost management tooling platform to support cloud MSPs, but also deliver training and enablement services for them. This includes the training of the tools, HyperOne™ and Cloud Broker Deck, and the OnePro Cloud’s self-developed cloud governance and cost management framework for cloud MSPs. OnePro Cloud can also deliver enablement workshop and ongoing services to support cloud MSPs, reducing their concerns on the lack of in-house skills on cloud governance and cost management. 

Note 1 the quoted information from Accenture and Brain & Company 

Those two companies’ comments can be found at Financial Times’ published article on March 9th, 2021.  See here: https://www.ft.com/content/b7586c09-0c47-45db-8b1f-3301974a8642?ftcamp=traffic/partner/feed_headline/us_yahoo/auddev

OnePro Cloud Company Introduction 

OnePro Cloud, a trusted cloud technology services provider, specializes in helping businesses successfully incorporate cloud services and derive the most value from their digital transformation initiative. One of the company’s key strengths is guiding businesses to overcome fears and concerns surrounding cloud adoption, simplifying cloud services and guiding them to succeed in their cloud tech implementation.

OnePro Cloud was set up in 2017 in Shanghai, China, by a group of IT professionals, united towards helping modern enterprises successfully incorporate cloud technology. The company is a nationally leading cloud tech specialist today, helping enterprises of different segments like finance, smart city, medical, energy, transportation, manufacturing and education, succeed in their cloud adoption. 

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