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Cloud Cost Management, Storage Growth and SaaS Will Lead Organizations into 2023

By Amit Rathi, VP of Engineering and David McNerney, Sr. Product Manager at Virtana

The journey to the cloud has always come with its challenges and now there is the economic uncertainty hanging over us, one thing that has become abundantly clear, companies are reassessing their tools to see where they can cut back on costs and maximize usage of resources.  In 2023, we see companies looking to cloud cost management, storage and SaaS to help optimize costs and resources.

Below we'll take a look at each of these areas and share why we believe they will have an impact in the year to come.  

1.   Cloud cost management will give companies the upper hand

Considering the current economic uncertainty, most companies want to have detailed insights into its cloud spend and the ability to control the spend and optimize its resource utilization. Driven by the digital transformation over the last few years companies have adopted multiple clouds based on their individual business needs. 

In a recent State of Multi-Cloud Management 2022 report based on a survey of 360 cloud decision makers in the US and UK, 82% of organizations surveyed are currently leveraging a multi-cloud strategy, and 78% of organizations surveyed have workloads deployed in more than three public clouds. As a result, most companies have very little insight about spend, the correlation with business applications and potential cost savings possibilities.

As organizations start to drive towards cloud adoption maturity that is coupled with business pressure on reduced spend, the companies who have a proactive approach will have a significant upper hand in dealing with uncertainty.

2.   Storage growth will drive the need for more cost cutting tools

But cloud management isn't the only way organizations plan to cut costs in 2023. Hybrid cloud storage consumption is growing, yet cost cutting tools are not quite there. Currently, most tools focus on compute storage, leaving organizations with soaring cloud storage costs that are growing at a faster rate than overall cloud spend. In 2023, organizations we've heard from will be looking to expand their cost cutting measures from compute to storage.

3.   SaaS will be all about specialization

Lastly, as part of planning properly for cloud migration, understanding the business case for each cloud is crucial to a successful cloud presence. Most cloud providers have become comparable in basic capabilities, resulting in very little to differentiate them on. The journey from here is going to be about specialization. Companies will need to start diving a little deeper into the key value they are looking for and which cloud provider can provide it best. For example, for some AI and ML capabilities, there may be a specific cloud that has a significant upper hand, or for PaaS there could be another cloud which delivers a significant discount based on previous usage. For organizations to drive the value needed to stay competitive, it will be critical to have the right infrastructure and tools in place to effectively manage data and operations in a multi-cloud environment. Also, by assigning a role to each cloud, organizations can get the most out of that instance for each business case and task, optimizing tools, resources, and costs in the process. 

While 2023 will be all about cutting costs and maximizing resources for organizations to truly make the most of their current tech stack, they must create cloud cost management strategies that provide answers to these questions - What is the purpose of each cloud instance? What is the strategy for migration? What about the cloud strategy post migration? 

If organizations can answer these questions cloud leaders will have the confidence to adjust resources where it's needed and head into 2023 with strong numbers and an improved cloud position.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Amit Rathi is Vice President of Engineering at Virtana. He leads all aspects of development, testing, devops, support and cloud operations for Virtana's products. Amit brings a strong software engineering, customer-centric background and 20+ years of experience in Virtana's specific Information Technology Operations Management (ITOM) domain.

Amit recently spent 12 years at BMC Software, building enterprise on-premises and SaaS projects, delivering customer-centric product experiences and developing high-quality products.

Throughout his career, Amit has been responsible for transforming legacy products into high- quality solutions that deliver outcomes for customers. He has built new SaaS services from scratch and designed and created scalable architecture for enterprise solutions.

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David McNerney is Senior Product Manager at Virtana where he is focused on the full lifecycle development and strategy of Virtana Cloud Cost Management capabilities.