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.
##
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.
