By Azrin Shukor, NetApp Malaysia’s Country Manager
The first year of the pandemic induced an unprecedented rush to the cloud as enterprises sought a lifeline to ensure business continuity and resilience. Companies had to implement a new working environment for their employees almost immediately when the pandemic hit Malaysia.
While the government has allowed 100 percent of the private sector workforce to return to offices, it appears that working from home has become the norm and will remain so in Malaysia even in the post Covid-19 pandemic, as most employees are able to access work applications via smartphones through the cloud. Malaysia’s cloud computing market is expected to be worth US$3.7 billion in 2024, growing at a compounded annual rate of 13 percent from 2020. The Covid-19 pandemic has made businesses change their mindset, seeking to perform better in a changing environment.
As our economies remain in a fragile state, all businesses must continue to exercise financial prudence. Where the cloud has been effective in helping organisations respond quickly to disruption and changing work patterns, uncontrolled and unforeseen costs from cloud adoption in the longer term can be debilitating.
Now that the dust is settling, it is time for organisations to revisit past decisions and consider where cloud costs can be optimised, without compromising the desire to build back better.
The reality of cloud overload
Cloud usage within the enterprise is like a household’s electricity consumption model. Like how a utility provider manages a power generator on your behalf, organisations can rely on a cloud provider to outsource data centre maintenance while benefiting from built-in capabilities like high availability, scalability, and secure infrastructure. Like convenient access to electricity, cloud performance is built for remote access and operates under a flexible pay-as-you-consume model. However, leaving it on unnecessarily will rack up a higher than anticipated monthly bill.
After initially moving everything to the cloud, organisations are now having difficulties monitoring and managing consumption across their various cloud deployments. This is what we call cloud sprawl – or the proliferation of uncontrolled cloud use. This issue has resulted in 30 percent of cloud spend being wasted.
To avoid wastage, cloud agnostic cost optimisation tools that deliver granular, real-time visibility across the entire hybrid IT infrastructure are critical for governing and remediating situations that drive-up costs.
From ‘lift-and-shift’ to ‘lift-and-transform’
Many organisations that accelerated cloud adoption during lockdowns used a “lift-and-shift” approach. Lift-and-shift, where on-premises workloads are replicated completely in the cloud, is the quickest method to ensuring business services remain available to a suddenly distributed workforce and external users.
Not long ago, NetApp helped an international email marketing company lift-and-shift millions of files to the cloud so it could quickly scale its business. More recently, Australia’s Monash University turned to NetApp to manage the files that it was shifting to AWS’s public cloud. This facilitated data collaboration for its students and researchers, while allowing Monash to reduce its capital expenditure and scale cloud storage capacity up or down as needed.
It may be tempting for businesses to simply migrate everything to the cloud, but the reality is never that simple. While it is technically possible to perform any business task in the cloud, it does not mean that every on-premises workflow and application – in its present state or form – is optimised to do so. Businesses may face compatibility issues, such as the original code of applications running on outdated software. Unnecessary costs may also be incurred from the transmission of data across different locations.
Enterprises must therefore consider which applications should be shifted back into an on-premise environment, modified for new cloud infrastructure, or fully re-architected to work in any cloud environment.
The silver lining of cloud migration
As businesses recover post-pandemic, the US$2.5 billion that Malaysia is projected to spend by 2023 on cloud computing this year should be utilised prudently. It is not too late to switch to a better cloud optimisation and migration strategy – one that ensures minimal disruption to data-dependent applications and accommodates your IT budget.
Malaysia’s e-commerce industry is expected to reach US$11 billion in 2025 with the help of the dynamic economy, developed enrapture for digital technologies, qualified talent pool and sizable young population. With Malaysia being one of the fastest-growing e-commerce markets in Southeast Asia, business behaviours are being reshaped and consumer practices are transitioning to online platforms, as this will be entrenched as Malaysia’s new normal.
