It seems like after years of pushing, educating and campaigning, the IT industry has accepted that the total cost of ownership for cloud infrastructure wins out over remaining on-premise.
Enterprises are migrating core systems to the cloud, in some cases across-the-board and others in a hybrid fashion. Many IT infrastructure projects have a firm ‘cloud-first’ mandate, and projects requiring new on-premise infrastructure are smeared with the ‘tech-debt’ brush.
However, the economics of the “lift-and-shift” method of moving to the cloud often does not add up. The cost of running a server 24 hours a day using a public cloud provider compared to the cost of on-prem infrastructure to support that same server is expensive. Any savings with this method have to revolve around time savings, staff reductions and more agility in delivering projects. But they are there, and hopefully, our days of waiting for the infrastructure team to provision infrastructure for our projects are almost in the past.
Saas (Software as a Service) provides the next evolution in cost savings. The promise of SaaS is to provide a production-ready, purpose-built system ready for near-immediate consumption by customers. This removes the need for the customer to manage any infrastructure for that software function, as well as providing a host of other advantages over an on-premise or even a public cloud-hosted solution.
A classic example of customer success in moving from traditional software deployments to SaaS solutions is the Siebel CRM to Salesforce migrations. Salesforce looked after the entire stack, from servers, to software, to maintenance. So now you don’t need to look after your infrastructure either on-premise or in the cloud.
There is yet another interesting area to capitalize on. Serverless. This is a model where you only pay for the resources you use. Applications are written in a micro-service approach where ‘functions’ can be called as and when they are needed. These functions sit in a cold state when they are unused and do not incur a cost. Compare a web application running on a virtual server with a serverless run server:
- A Cloud VM hosting the website needs to run 24/7, even if it is only requested by customers infrequently. You pay for the server running 24/7 even when it’s idling, if you want high availability, you need to run multiple servers, potentially doubling your cost.
- A Serverless hosted website will only be incurring a cost when someone requests the website, and only for the execution time. The infrastructure is highly available with redundancy built in and seamless to you and your end users.
This technology has only become popular within the last few years, but many applications are now utilizing this technology.
Rewriting applications to be Serverless compatible is a huge job. But there are many SaaS providers out there which already leverage this technology. Assertiv being one of them, and another being A Cloud Guru which inspired our pivot in the Serverless early days.
A common thread with Serverless SaaS providers is the low price point they can offer their customers. These businesses spend very little on infrastructure, and can calculate down to very minute levels, such as how much a single user will cost to serve. These savings (at least in Assertiv’s case) get passed onto our customers. People often ask why Assertiv is so much cheaper than our competitors, there’s your answer.
So when considering a cloud migration strategy, look on the market for SaaS providers which can handle your workloads, but target companies innovating with Serverless infrastructure. You can be confident their technology is bleeding edge, and your infrastructure bill will have no resemblance of the days of on-premise.
If you are interested in Identity and Access Management solutions, Assertiv has your back. Reach out and we will be happy to help.
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