Principle of Cloud Management: Ideal Balance

Cloud costs can at least double the infrastructure bills of companies operating at scale, put pressure on margins, and weigh heavily on market cap. Most people would agree that you won't get a decent return on investment out of the cloud if you just lift and shift your current architecture. However, there is a strong argument that cloud can work well if you migrate to microservices. Amazon Prime itself dumped its microservices architecture, decreasing its cloud infrastructure costs by a staggering 90%.

Cloud costs have become a significant problem. But the challenge extends beyond cost — it also encompasses performance, security, and data management. Businesses must consider all four dimensions as they work on cloud optimisation and striking the right balance between what they do in the public cloud and what they handle on premises.

Analyse Performance

Everybody is talking about generative AI, and many companies are launching efforts in the larger realm of artificial intelligence. When companies use large language models, they may upload all of their data to the cloud. Enterprise applications such as SAP have similar workload requirements.

If you put that data in the cloud, you will have to pay an egress cost whenever you bring your data down. That can be expensive — but data does not need to live in the public cloud. Instead, you can store it "near-cloud" and still enjoy near sub-millisecond access to the cloud resources that you need.

If you adopt the right near-cloud solution, you will also get guaranteed availability — dramatically better than what you will typically get from the cloud alone. No cloud provider offers a 100% data availability guarantee; their guarantees exist primarily as compensation mechanisms for not meeting SLAs, not as genuine reliability commitments.

Address Security, Privacy, and Data Access

Meta was recently hit with a $1.3 billion fine for moving European personal data to the United States, in violation of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This raises the question of whether other large companies believe they have the right to move people's data around as they see fit — and whose data is truly safe.

Some organisations with compliance obligations are beginning to adopt "near-cloud" strategies that deliver nearly the same performance as cloud-native storage at a lower cost, with the benefit of managing precisely where data resources reside. It's up to each organisation to decide how much ambiguity they can live with and what data policies to set. Some types of data should never leave a locked room inside your data centre, while other data may be entirely comfortable in the public cloud.

Ensure that you have data discovery and visibility capabilities — this enables you to understand what data is where so you can effectively address compliance requirements across multiple jurisdictions.

Understand Data Management

Making sure data is secured, accessible, and in the optimal location is part of the nuts and bolts of managing data — but such efforts should really be defined as storage management. Data management is more about the nature of the data itself: what data do you have? What do the bits and bytes of that data mean? Policy and compliance happen at that level.

Yet data management and storage management often get blurred into one. Both are important and you must do both — but be sure you understand that what some people call "data management" is actually just basic storage hygiene. Ensure you have the capabilities to catalogue data, perform analytics on it, and otherwise address data management at every stage of the data value chain.

Act Holistically

Many organisations adopted a "cloud first" strategy with good intentions of optimising their utilisation of infrastructure resources. In some cases, careful planning delivered extremely beneficial results. However, many more organisations have rightly scrutinised the cost-benefit of their "cloud-first" or "cloud-only" decisions as real-world costs emerged.

Data storage infrastructure has quietly emerged as one area for extreme cloud optimisation. Egress costs — downloading data from the cloud back to your operations — are the hidden bill that many organisations only discover after full commitment to a public cloud strategy.

The Path Forward

The ideal balance is not a fixed formula — it depends on your workloads, compliance requirements, performance needs, and cost targets. A hybrid approach, where you leverage the cloud's elasticity for appropriate workloads while retaining on-premises control for sensitive or high-volume data, typically delivers the best combination of cost efficiency, performance, and control. Working with an experienced cloud partner to model your specific scenario is the most reliable path to getting the balance right.