Cost savings in today’s cloud.

“Many issues with cloud platforms can be addressed by paying attention to them as early as the migration,” David argues. “Therefore, pay adequate attention to configuration. Especially the first few months, pay close attention to your usage costs so you can manage that well. You can never estimate the costs exactly in advance, there are too many variables and you have to deal with billing per second. So keep an eye on it so you can make timely adjustments. In addition, pay sufficient attention to information and manageability: without information you cannot act and without manageability you cannot intervene.”

David knows that many IT partners and cloud platforms take over so much that it seems like you as a customer don’t need to know anything yourself. However, the opposite is true. “A good implementation requires a lot of knowledge. You only need that knowledge temporarily, only during implementation. But then it is immediately vital. If you don’t invest in that knowledge in that first phase, you run the risk of security leaks and almost certainly always pay too much.”

Although the focus was on costs, David also made recommendations on governance. “It doesn’t help them if it’s fixed now, but they run into unexpectedly high costs again later,” he says. “So it’s important to gain and maintain insight yourself. Therefore, in workshops I explained the tools that are in the platform that allow you to control the costs yourself. My advice was to set cost caps and alerts so that when changes occur, they are alerted immediately. I also recommended setting up a dashboard so you can always see your costs together at a glance. There were also gains to be made in this case by purchasing resources for a longer period of time, rather than paying per second.”

“With the Azure Cloud Scan, I perform an audit on cloud migrations,” David explains. “I look at security, governance and cost. In this case, Vision Healthcare specifically asked me to look at costs. Their desire was to reverse the cost increase and get back to the ‘old’ cost picture. But they had no idea why costs had risen so much. At Vision Healthcare, the developers are given a lot of freedom to deploy their own work in Azure, however, this requires a good framework to manage costs and security. ”

Diederik Oostburg, IT director at Vision Healthcare: “Based on a two-day audit, David brought into focus where the problem was coming from. He created insight into the largest cost items by adding a number of dashboards and in doing so exposed a number of common configuration errors that were causing unnecessary costs. For example, we had unnecessarily high levels of individual resources when services could also use shared resources. David also discovered a number of resources that we simply weren’t using anymore and resources that were doing the same work. In cleaning these up, we had actually pretty much recouped the cost of David’s audit.” David fed back his findings so that Vision Healthcare could get to work making changes on its own. He does go back a few more times to watch with them.