Cloud Optimization is Key to Business Success

Originally published March 2023

After years of rushing workloads to the cloud, enterprise IT leaders are starting to rethink their cloud strategies. As these organizations slow down to speed up, cloud optimization has surfaced as one of the more effective ways of maximizing the business value of cloud.

That's according to WWT's latest survey of IT leaders, who said their cloud migrations were initially predicated on the justification of cost savings, primarily from attempting to reduce their data center footprint by migrating everything to the cloud. Now well into that journey, survey respondents reported not seeing as much value as they predicted, leading to a "double bubble" effect: an increase in both infrastructure and cloud costs.

Tectonic shifts in workplace dynamics, accelerated by the pandemic, pushed many organizations to adopt an aggressive cloud-first mentality, whether rooted in a strong business foundation or not.

But organizations that rushed everything to the cloud are quickly realizing the need to recalibrate and optimize their overarching cloud strategies: from identifying the need for underlying IT modernization, to establishing proper cloud governance and best practices, to reining in cloud costs and unchecked cloud sprawl across IT environments. Sounds complex, right?