The rush to the cloud is well underway. According to a 2016 IDG Enterprise Cloud Computing Survey of IT leaders, 45% of their IT environments was hosted in a private, public, or hybrid cloud environment. Cloud vendors are responding to the demand with a dizzying array of options which routinely lead to costly over-provisioning and sub-optimal configurations. Assessing options even within a single cloud provider can be complex business, let…

Employees and executives often struggle to cope with an abundance of tools meant to facilitate better collaboration and online work management. Even with multiple tools in place, nothing seems to be in the right place and the tools (e.g., email, online chat, file sharing) don’t always work well together. As a result, many employees give up and default to the tool they are most familiar with: email. “Email will never…

By almost any measure, cloud computing is on a tear. Most organizations have grown comfortable with this form of computing, and many have grown passionate. Unfortunately, far too many companies are still using a haphazard, piecemeal approach in their adoption of different cloud models and services. The lack of a comprehensive cloud computing strategy today will likely come back to haunt these companies further down the road. Why are so…

Organizations are moving application workloads to public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) in droves. After all, it’s a cost-effective way to get things done, right? Not necessarily. In reality, many organizations are overspending and overprovisioning their cloud instances is a key reason why. Analysts predict that by 2020, 80% of organizations will overshoot their cloud IaaS budgets due to a lack of effective cost optimization. In this five-part series,…

In this final segment of our ongoing series about right-sizing public cloud instances for optimal performance and cost efficiency, we are focusing on a common source of cloud overspending: deadwood. Idle or “zombie” instances plague many public cloud environments, insidiously wasting your opex budget dollars. This deadwood can occur without you even realizing it, and is often the result of hasty deployments or a lack of accountability in the cloud…

Which are the best tools for enterprise work management? The ones that employees will actually use, of course–tools that deliver an easy, intuitive, and flexible experience for users. But beyond the user experience, the tool must offer robust security, administration controls, and integration with other enterprise applications. How do you find the best collaboration tools for your organization? Start with a bottoms-up look at what has already been adopted by…

In previous blog posts we’ve discussed the challenges organizations face in choosing the right cloud instances, and how understanding workload patterns is critical to right-sizing public cloud instances for optimal CPU and memory efficiency. In this post, we’ll look at a key aspect of instance selection that plays a critical role in optimizing AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud spend:   modernizing your instances. Modernizing public cloud instances is the act of…

In our last blog post in this series, we discussed how to overcome the “bump-up loop” in which you continually increase CPU resource allocations in public cloud instances, even when it isn’t needed. In this blog post, we’ll look at another cloud resource management challenge: memory. Sizing memory appropriately is extremely important because memory is a major driver of cost, and tends to be what we see as the most…

In the first blog in this series, we looked at why it’s so important to look at an application’s workload patterns when sizing for any public cloud, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and others. In this post, we’ll look at another common pitfall that we call the cloud instance “bump-up loop.” Here’s how it works. You use a reporting tool that says your application workload is running at…

Of all the reasons to move to public cloud solutions during the past decade, reducing computing costs has perennially ranked as a top driver. That remains true today – in its most recent cloud computing survey of more than 900 IT decision makers, IDG Enterprise found that 42% cited lower total cost of ownership as a key objective behind their cloud initiatives, a higher percentage of mentions than any other…