Understanding Your Cloud
“Are we getting the most out of our cloud investment?” is a question that most large-scale cloud customers will ask of themselves. Organisations at the enterprise level have dozens of stakeholders dependent on their cloud infrastructure to deliver efficient, cost-effective results. For these orgs, understanding the alignment of cloud investment to business goals is paramount to business success.

But at large companies, roles are typically specialised in a way that siloes objectives and obscures the full view of cloud operations. A DevOps engineer manages to a different set of objectives than a security leader, leading to dramatically different cloud infrastructure needs and priorities. And when questions of investment come up, answers typically arise based on which role has the most influential voice, rather than a more collaborative, integrated approach.

Often, the first, most prominent concern is cost. And the cloud market has responded, with a glut of tools designed to identify surface-level inefficiencies in cloud spend and make quick-fix recommendations that help save a few quid. Engineers can point to some percentage reductions, leaders feel validated and everyone wins, right?

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Quick-fix savings like these create an “Illusion of Efficiency”, where there’s an appearance of efficiency via cost savings – savings which are not tied to any longer term objectives or strategy. For example, saving on cost by consolidating storage to a single location – without considering impacts to latency, reliability and more. In the short term, these surface-level fixes provide initial cost reduction, but as the business evolves and scales, those same fixes quickly reveal themselves to be restrictive, limiting margins and innovation.

That’s because traditional FinOps and native tools analyze historical patterns that only address the obvious inefficiencies like cost, capacity, and utilization – superficial signals that are likely masking deeper efficiency problems. While these tools identify some unused resources to trim, they’re unable to detect any allocated resources that are inefficiently utilised – from poor infrastructure design, to opportunities to streamline with new technology solutions. This is because these technology-only solutions lack the ability to identify the intent behind the architecture, understanding why things were built the way they are and how that aligns with current objectives. This wider context is the kind of true cloud intelligence that is needed for organizations to truly leverage their cloud investment to its highest and best use.

What’s more, this true cloud intelligence arises when considering the wider architectural context against those key pillars in cloud optimisation – operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency and sustainability. A cohesive approach to cloud optimisation allows for these hidden inefficiencies to be identified and addressed, driving long-term cloud health and cohesion across the entire organisation.

To cut through the Illusion of Efficiency, you need to go beyond just visibility and efficiency recommendations and seek relevant guidance to optimise and scale your cloud. You need robust, intelligent technology that gives insights you can implement with the backing of expert cloud architects.

Meet DoiT Cloud Intelligence™

DoiT Cloud Intelligence™ is the only context-aware multicloud intelligence platform that enables you to optimise, scale, and innovate. Powered by proactive, industry-defining expertise, customers turn insights into actions hand-in-hand with DoiT’s cloud architects to make their cloud performant, reliable, and secure.

For more than a decade, DoiT has helped customers take ownership of their cloud investments, aligning architecture with business goals to increase operating margins and fuel innovation. DoiT’s solutions examine all six key domains of the cloud to drive holistic health optimised for current and future needs.

Through DoiT’s advanced intelligence platform, customers are able to access dozens of powerful tools designed to measure and analyze cloud infrastructure, along with unlimited, unmatched collaboration with DoiT’s highly-advanced cloud architects. DoiT Cloud Intelligence is fully aligned to four key areas of intelligence:

  • Workload Intelligence: Understand how existing and future architecture and software deployments are serving overall business goals. Use out-of-the-box dashboards, third-party data ingestion, seamless API integrations, and more to help manage complex environments.
  • Operating Intelligence: Ensure deployed workloads are operating in the most efficient way – and serving your business objectives. Track and optimise spend across different platforms, with extended data retention to analyse historical trends.
  • Human Intelligence: Work with DoiT’s global staff of dedicated cloud experts on audits and careful analyses of the entire cloud infrastructure. Uncover the deeper optimisation opportunities hidden in the architecture, deploy new services and technologies, and level up cloud expertise through custom training and workshops.
  • Automation Intelligence: Leverage DoiT’s state-of-the-art AI assistant to create reports, dive deeper into your data, answer questions related to costs and usage, and more. Get real-time insights into cost spikes as they occur, and automate workflows to take immediate action on savings opportunities.

The integrated value of DoiT Cloud Intelligence goes beyond just cost savings to drive overall performance. For one EMEA customer, the results were staggering. The customer was able to leverage a close collaboration with a DoiT architect alongside advanced FinOps tools like Cloud Analytics to make significant structural changes to its cloud architecture. As a result, the customer achieved a 65% reduction in RDS costs while improving load speeds 10x above the prior benchmark.

The True Promise of Your Cloud Environment

The cloud is full of endless possibilities, endless opportunities and endless headaches. In the face of this level of complexity, it’s tempting to accept the simplest solution and move on. But without building a deeper understanding of how the cloud environment aligns to business objectives, orgs restrict themselves to only a fraction of the potential the cloud has to offer.

Don’t go on your cloud journey alone – find a trustworthy copilot to closely collaborate with and discover just how much promise your environment has under the surface. To learn more about DoiT Cloud Intelligence™, visit www.doit.com.