Enterprises and their technology departments are already being impacted by the potential sharp economic downturn. Their customers’ spending habits have shifted, and they are taking more time to make buying decisions.
Enterprise leaders are being forced to make difficult decisions about their budgets and workforce, prioritizing what and who are considered essential to the well-being of the enterprise. More than 108,000 workers have already been laid off in 2023, so leaders are examining every opportunity for saving costs and maximizing the resources they have. Many are now wisely looking to the cloud as a cost cutting opportunity.
Leveraging the Cloud to Weather Economic Uncertainty
According to one survey, cloud computing has been one of the four technology investments enterprise leaders are pursuing, even in the face of a pending recession. In fact, about 84 percent of enterprises intend to increase their public cloud storage and the amount of data they store in the public cloud within the next year.
Currently, one of the most pressing challenges for enterprises is being able to continue to meet ambitious growth goals and sales targets while stringently managing costs. Even as they are reducing their budgets and workforce, enterprises still have to innovate and refine their services and products according to their customers’ needs and expectations.
This focus on cloud for technology use cases during an economic slowdown is not surprising when you consider that leveraging the cloud to host workloads and applications introduces benefits like scalability and flexibility to system infrastructure and a reduction in IT costs. However, the key to reaping the benefits of cloud usage is being able to use it efficiently while reigning in its costs.
In 2022, cloud spend increased by 20 to 30 percent. With a recession on the horizon, overspending and under-utilization of the cloud makes it a very costly liability that occupies much-needed resources. Cloud spend has to undergo even more increased scrutiny when economic indicators point to a possible recession.
The end goal is to maximize the use of the cloud while continuing to create value and reduce cloud spend.
How is DevOps Impacted by Economic Uncertainty?
For DevOps teams, cloud computing is essential to implementing IT transformations that further business goals, enhance customer experience, and create new streams of revenue. When implemented correctly, the cloud improves the effectiveness of an enterprise’s processes and has a large business impact.
Currently, DevOps teams are feeling the effect of cost and labor cutting measures even as they are still tasked with ensuring powerful and resilient application performance. They still have to create, test and deploy services and applications as quickly as possible using cloud-native tools like Kubernetes. The goals for reducing the cycle time for getting to market faster have to be met as well. These tasks can introduce challenges and risks even for fully staffed teams.
One of the drawbacks of having a reduced DevOps workforce that still has to meet and/or exceed goals and KPIs is that more will be expected of the remaining engineers. This can create an environment in which errors increase. For example, applications may have performance issues that slow productivity. Applications may not adhere to regulatory compliance requirements, or they may be a security risk that expose the enterprise, its workers or customers.
Meeting Workload Challenges with Automation
Addressing the issue of reigning in cloud costs while still obtaining value and ensuring optimal DevOps performance during an economic downturn—making the enterprise more resilient—begins with defining or redefining the metrics critical to business goals and ensuring DevOps should understand exactly what those goals should look like.
Enterprise leaders should also take a critical look at the enterprise’s cloud program.
It is also necessary to leverage the technologies that answer customers’ demands for cloud optimization and cost reduction. Enterprises can optimize the processes and tasks needed for the resources that are critical to providing their services and products their customers expect. Companies, such as Granulate, provide autonomous solutions that reduce cloud costs, while also freeing up R&D teams to focus on maintaining, updating, and improving applications to satisfy the end user.
The automation of manual tasks is crucial to managing continually expanding environments that are increasingly complex and dynamic. Automation streamlines operations, limits errors on repetitive tasks, saves time and improves performance. This has a significant impact on managing cloud spend. DevOps can be more productive, focusing on more critical and higher-value tasks. All these factors lead to lower operating expenses and optimized workloads that operate more efficiently.
Enterprises that are able to effectively reduce costs, optimize their resources and continue to create value are best prepared to weather periods of economic uncertainty. With Granulate’s autonomous workload optimization platform, you are creating a more agile enterprise that can maintain momentum during any economic conditions and that can be prepared to meet future demands.