Unlike a laptop or piece of IT hardware that you only pay for once, cloud computing is a constant entry on enterprises’ balance sheets.
Cloud adoption across West Africa remains a net positive as growing demand leads to increased availability of infrastructure and vendors.
Still, there is always the potential for organisations to lose control of their spending, whether it’s because of internal circumstances or ones beyond their control.
No cloud strategy is complete without a cost management system in place, and that system becomes more critical as competition in the region reaches new levels and cloud service providers work to offer the best value proposition to enterprises.
The key to success lies with enterprises taking a more rounded, long-term view of cloud computing, treating it as an ongoing expenditure that requires continuous monitoring and collaboration, backed by new management practices and clarity on what they want the cloud to do for them.
Managing cloud costs with the help of FinOps
Companies move to the cloud for many reasons, but chief among them are the benefits of flexible and scalable IT infrastructure at a higher level of cost efficiency. But that efficiency isn’t always guaranteed.
Mismanagement and a failure to properly migrate to or handle cloud resources can lead to companies overspending.
This can be the result of overprovisioning resources or underutilising them, inflated cloud data transfer and storage costs, cloud misconfigurations, or a lack of governance and oversight.
West African businesses need a cloud model that suits them, whether it’s pay-as-you-go, a fixed monthly or annual subscription, or reserved or spot instances that provide extra flexibility to enterprises and potentially offered with sizable discounts.
At the same time, they can utilise cost control features such as resource tagging, APIs for real-time usage notifications, and AI/ML-powered analysis and forecasting tools that are now readily available.
A big component of cloud cost management is FinOps, which combines finance and DevOps for maximum accountability and oversight.
Cloud environments are inherently complex and so to achieve cost optimisation, all relevant teams need to be hands-on and aware of how budgets are being spent.
FinOps also allows enterprises to more effectively enforce governance and compliance procedures, which in turn inform and shape the financial decisions enterprises need to make.
The hyperscale value proposition
Never before have African businesses had such a level of choice when it comes to cloud service providers. At the same time, hyperscalers have evolved their value offering as the cloud becomes standard practice for businesses, and they themselves become invested in helping businesses achieve their organisational goals.
When selecting a hyperscaler to partner with, businesses in West Africa should consider the following factors:
- Cost: Easily the most important factor, businesses can determine the value offering of hyperscalers based on their committed spend agreements as well as hyperscalers’ effort to expand their capacity, partnerships, and capabilities as a holistic cloud services provider.
- Compatibility: Businesses cannot waste capital and resources having to retrofit their existing applications to be compatible with a new computing environment. By prioritising interoperability as part of the selection process, they can identify which providers can deliver the smoothest migration process.
- Scalability/Agility: Hyperscalers must be able to respond to businesses’ IT needs, scaling systems and allocating resources as needed. This includes handling data transfers efficiently.
- Support: Not every business has the same level of access to cloud skills and expertise, and should therefore be able to turn to their hyperscalers for support.
Hyperscalers have also begun to increase their focus on data sovereignty and residency, addressing concerns related to data protection and compliance, itself a growing concern among African enterprises.
With features such as local availability zones and specialised privacy solutions, enterprises can keep their data where it needs to be and adhere to any relevant data regulations.
Collaboration makes for resilient, cost-effective cloud
Making cost management a part of your enterprise’s cloud migration strategy isn’t difficult, not when it is built into both hyperscalers’ service offerings and the platforms that enterprises today use to build applications and software.
For example, enterprise containerisation software can come equipped with a cost management tool that enables businesses to track their cloud spend and understand the cost of their clusters, either in the public cloud or on-premise.
But more than that, enterprises need to assume a collaborative stance with their cloud and platform vendors, making them a part of the organisation’s journey and digital transformation.
They are invested in your future because it is tied to their own, and it’s through collaboration that enterprises can achieve the best results and build the next generation of cloud-enabled business applications and solutions.
