The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the working of businesses across the globe, specifically cloud service providers. While there has certainly been a spike in demand for cloud-based services, companies could still be paying a premium.
In the last decade, businesses started to embark on their respective cloud journeys, given the promise of agility and decreased operational costs. The switch to work-from-home due to the pandemic has fuelled this trend further. While the cost of IT hardware has forced businesses to put brakes on their spending, cloud’s vague pricing has led to increased costs.
Cloud costs are on the rise – primarily because there are no real controls. It’s often difficult to keep tabs on who is iterating, upgrading or migrating which systems onto which cloud, agrees Mukund Rao, Chief Business Officer of the Banking, Financial Services and Insurance vertical at Mindtree. “Once you have a process and system in place that gives you that view through a single pane of glass, and a mechanism to request more resources, overall spend trends are much simpler to forecast and control,” he adds.
Visibility is just one-third of the battle to control cloud spending, while tracking resource use and maintaining flexible spending are the rest of the fight, Rao states.
Given that companies are graduating to cloud environments for better efficiency, controlling costs related to cloud can be daunting. “The nature of large enterprises—projects, departments and service lines that each are on their independent transformation journeys—means that hybrid multicloud is a reality,” states Rao. “It is inevitable—and that means resource waste is inevitable,” he adds.
“It comes down to line of sight, both from a holistic perspective and at the granular level of each project,” Rao explains. “Do you have the right environment in the right place at the right time, deployed at the right speed, capacity and cost? The challenge and solution are in defining an architecture where you can manage these islands of clouds. Once an organization has a mechanism to at least see, if not operate, all this as one integrated system, you can start to see significant ROI.”
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Mukund Rao, Chief Business Officer, Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI), Mindtree
As Chief Business Officer for Mindtree’s Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) business, Mukund leads a portfolio of accounts globally and is responsible to formulate strategy and its execution to accelerate growth. He acts as a close advisor to consult, facilitate and align client needs with Mindtree and its partner capabilities, to drive transformation. Mukund has been in financial services consulting for 20+ years and has a track record of shaping and building practices with a strong market positioning, and helping clients succeed. He has an MBA from the University of Texas and is based out of New York.
