Rebalancing is something that many of us are familiar with in terms of our personal finances. We regularly keep track of our accounts and spend time considering the right investment mix – stocks, bonds, mutual funds – based on economic conditions, past performance, and current needs. While we rightly attend to rebalancing our finances on a regular basis, it is important to think about it in other areas as well. One of these is Cloud Workloads.
As you gain insight into actual versus planned spending and a better understanding of your upcoming capacity plans and performance needs, it is important to look at your current needs and set about rebalancing your workloads in order to optimize both cost and performance.
While AWS has grown rapidly and occupies a dominant place in the market, many organizations have found that they need to rebalance their workloads to fit their evolving requirements. This rebalancing often means moving workloads from AWS back to either an on-premise computing (hybrid IT) environment or to a new hosting provider. Key reasons this occurs include:
- Changes in usage. Flexibility is a key benefit of the public cloud. Auto-scaling and the ability to run instances at multiple geographic data centers is appealing. However, once your applications have more predictable levels of demand they can often be run faster and for less money on a dedicated server than in scalable environment based on reserved instances.
- Changes in business strategy. As companies develop, they often find themselves acquiring and spinning off business units at a rapid pace. One company we recently worked with found itself with large amounts of IT capacity after a spinoff, but had made long term AWS commitments to secure the best cloud pricing. In such cases, it is often far less expensive to use IT resources that you already own rather than be trapped paying for capacity you don’t need.
- Changes in level of IT Support. Moving to the cloud does not remove the need for on-going application support, security, or backup and disaster recovery. Instead of simplifying their work, organizations often find they end up managing two data centers, their own and AWS. Rather than increasing complexity or overtaxing employees a better option might be a Managed Hosting provider that can provide complete support for key workloads by partnering with a hybrid hosting provider.
Rebalancing and finding the right mix of Hybrid IT is becoming an increasingly important part of optimizing IT strategy and spending. Fortunately, with the right partner and infrastructure provider, migrating from AWS can be accomplished in a systematic way that reduces both time and stress.
Learn more about when and how to migrate AWS workloads to find your “Right Mix” on March 6th at our upcoming Webinar with Leaseweb.