Over the past decade, organizations all over the world have raced towards the cloud. In fact, in the APAC region alone, overall cloud spending is expected to reach US$200 billion by 2024 at a CAGR of 20%. 

However, while cloud technology has the potential to deliver transformational results, cloud integration is never as simple as it looks. Hidden costs, technical challenges and system complexity are just some of the things that can derail iPaaS implementations. 

To shed light on how these challenges can be overcome, we invited Jeff Campbell, Manager, Technology (CIO), Horizon Power to share his roadmap for success at the upcoming Cloud Integration APAC virtual event taking place March 29-30. On the day of the event, Jeff will be diving into the 5 Phases Of Expediting Cloud Integration. However, we recently asked him how he balances cost with performance across the cloud integration lifecycle. Here is what he had to say. 

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Seth Adler, Editor-in-Chief, IAN: Let’s start with the discovery phase. What are some of the common pitfalls, mistakes and hurdles people confront during the cloud integration discovery process? 

Jeff Campbell: My advice is to go back to the basics. How much storage do you have? How much compute are you going to need for each of your applications? Calculating those across the application stack, as well as the infrastructure stack and starting to map that into the toolset that does the right sizing for cloud environments.

In terms of common mistakes, one area to pay especially close attention to is data ingress and data egress. Will the database work better if it's in the same blob or same container as the application interface. Probably? Will data be going out more? Because, if you're accessing reports and things like that, you'll get charged for it, right? 

You've heard the term “bill shock,” right? You've really got to have the right tools in place to monitor and calculate costs. As you move to cloud, making sure that the toolset is well understood in terms of cost optimization, as well as resource optimization, is critical. Also that you have an appropriate staff embedded in your run team to manage that.

Seth Adler: How do I calculate the compute that I'm going to need? How do I read the tea leaves of something I can't necessarily see?

Jeff Campbell: You don't. Right? And this is the, I guess the balancing act, it's almost a second seat approach, right? You'll deploy some things. You'll get a feel for some of the lift and shift apps. You'll start to see sort of consumption rates and you'll kind of get a feel for it as you go.

Then as you get farther along in the cloud integration process, you'll actually have a good feel for what those things will be. So, it is a learning phase. 

I think what’s happened with a lot of organizations is that they saw the initial benefits and then tried to push everything to the cloud. Then in a reverse, once they got bill shocked, started to move things back. So then we started to see these hybrid environments. Cloud where it makes sense, and then lower cost data center and infrastructure on premise.

Seth Adler: So let’s say I’m one of these organizations that’s flip-flopped between on-prem and cloud due to unexpected costs, what do I do to kind of open back up and start back up the hill?

Jeff Campbell: I think this is where planning comes to the forefront. Also, making sure you engage with the right partner too. And I will say that whether it's AWS, Azure, what have you, they have very good technical teams that can help you through that process or professional services wrapped around that. Because let's be clear, it's a very different skillset, and technology is evolving at such a rapid pace. I look at the way Azure has caught up to AWS in terms of apps and functionality that it's delivering through its cloud platform, and it was way behind a couple of years ago. That's how quickly it evolves. And they train their staff to help organizations succeed in the adoption of cloud because it's in their best interests. 

And things never go perfectly. Failure is part of the learning process. I think as long as there's open dialogue with the executive around where the benefits realization will come and why that it is a learning process, I think most organizations have made good progress towards that.

See Jeff Present at the

Cloud Integration APAC virtual event

March 29-30, 2022 // Virtual Event