Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023. Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
2023: The Year of Managing Your DaaS and AVD Costs
By Brian Martynowicz,
Senior Director of Customer Engineering at Login VSI
A few years post-pandemic, businesses continue
to stabilize themselves financially while coming to terms with a new way of
working.
An unprecedented amount of the workforce is
still working in remote environments. However, recent
research shows that despite the increase in virtual
work environments, nearly 60% of businesses lack a cohesive Digital Workplace
strategy.
For the businesses heading into 2023 with
little visibility in their DaaS and AVD cost planning, there will be some
expensive lessons on your horizon.
The Cost of the Cloud
Nearly two decades ago, when I began in IT,
most of the workload was on-premises, and the cost model was relatively
straightforward. But I have watched this once simple budgeting model grow
increasingly complex.
Today's budget has moved out of the capital
expenditure process into an operational expenditure budget. As a result, for
most companies, any changes you make to your virtual environments are charged
to you immediately, sometimes minute-by-minute.
While praised for its benefit of limitless
scalability, the cloud's unlimited options also result in uncapped costs. The
foundation of your cloud consumption is based on instance sizes, but there are
also considerations around networking and storage performance. In most cases,
these factors contribute to the price you are spending per user, application,
and even minute.
With today's economic climate, budgeting and
cost management are at the top of C-suite discussions, and the pressure is on
for IT leaders to better manage AVD and DaaS costs.
Prediction 1: Shoehorn
Solutions Will Result in Ballooning Costs
The age-old saying, "you
can't manage what you can't measure," will ring louder than ever in 2023.
According to InfoWorld, 70% of infrastructure and operations leaders will
exceed their budget allocations due to a reactive planning methodology.
Cost can double when a
virtual machine is just one performance tier above its requirement; the wrong
blend of virtual machines can result in you paying up to 4x the cost of your
optimal configuration.
The message here is
straightforward: if you are not performing due diligence and planning
appropriately, your organization will likely go over budget.
For enterprises currently
struggling to manage their DaaS and AVD cloud costs, in 2023, you will need
performance insights to make wiser decisions regarding resource
planning. Otherwise, your organization will encounter unpredictable
expenses, inconsistent performance, and hits to business continuity.
Prediction 2:
Strategic Enterprises Will Focus on Optimization
Increasing or maintaining cloud capacity is not
the best strategy for every circumstance; proactivity starts with benchmarking that
can be used for ongoing measurement.
For example, some organizations, like Expedia, have evaluated their cloud spending and used it as an
opportunity to reduce their fixed costs.
While other companies capture cost savings by
moving back from the cloud entirely, one example is DropBox. DropBox recently moved its workloads back from the cloud and
increased profitability. It is estimated that $100B of their market value was
due to the cloud's impact on margins.
So, moving into 2023, how can organizations
ensure they benefit from a cloud operation without suffering ill effects? The
solution begins with one word: planning.
Prediction 3: Performance
Insights Will Drive Decision-Making
Greater visibility
into resource allocation and improved cost prediction is the only way to stop
the silent price creep that so many organizations grapple with in 2022.
But getting these insights will not be possible
without the right tools. To run a successful DaaS operation, the only way to
keep costs reasonable is through continuous testing and revising plans when
introducing change.
In 2023, teams who
successfully manage DaaS and AVD-related costs will use insights to:
- Know the costs of moving to DaaS
- Identify appropriate instances in AVD for their
users
- Create predictability in user experience and cost
Winning organizations will use a tool like
Login Enterprise to benchmark standards for performance and understand how price
correlates with their decisions. By proactively anticipating changes in
performance with Login Enterprise, IT leaders can more accurately predict what
resources are needed and adjust their budget accordingly.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brian is the Senior Director of Customer
Engineering at Login VSI. He ensures operational excellence in supporting and
implementing solutions within customer environments. He also oversees the
solutions architecting/presales engineering groups at Login VSI.
Working in IT consulting for the last 20 years,
he loves to share his field engineering expertise and customer services
management experience with others. In his free time, you will find him blogging
or producing vlogs for LinkedIn and acting as a Historical Commissioner in his hometown
of Chelsea, MA.