How companies better control their SaaS costs
The cloud is becoming increasingly popular - as a storage location and to run important applications. However, the costs are rising. That's why here are four tips on how companies can better control their SaaS costs.
According to Gartner, the number of companies relying on the cloud for storage will double by 2018. But that's only part of the story: the cloud is no longer just used for long-term storage or data backup. An increasing number of important applications are being run directly from the cloud. From Salesforce to SAP to Office 365, many important business applications are now cloud-based. These software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications help many companies become more efficient and more customer-centric. However, this often increases the cost of cloud storage and capacity.
The challenge here is to counteract and reduce costs, but at the same time ensure policy-compliant data protection and still provide high-performance cloud storage.
Fortunately, both are possible: added value thanks to important applications in the cloud AND controllable storage costs. So there's no need to panic.
Four tips to get a grip on the situation
Time for a storage diet: Want to minimize the storage requirements of your SaaS applications? Then use file-sharing technology and simply link to the appropriate content on your backup server. This way, you can also map your SaaS content to your managed infrastructure and also meet requirements around data governance, e-discovery, and compliance.
More demanding SLAs: Are you looking for a way to improve the performance of "Service Level Agreements" (SLAs)? You can do that by capturing data changes incrementally. This provides the granularity critical SaaS applications need for speedy recovery. It also gives you additional infrastructure that you can use for your dev/test operations.
Order an "à la carte" menu: When selecting your cloud provider, you should not go by the "in-house recommendation". Here, it is particularly important to minimize the complexity and cost of cloud migrations and operational management. That's why you should work with service providers that support multiple different cloud storage platforms to do this. This gives you the flexibility of an "à la carte" menu, whether you're using Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services S3, Rackspace or one of the myriad other options.
Think like a CFO: IT budgets are limited. If you're under pressure to support more SaaS applications or expand storage size, think like a CFO: choose the offering that gives you the most bang for your buck. With flexible pricing, you can make the purchase to fit - based on the amount of data you need to back up, the number of VMs you need, or the number of users.
These tips come from Commvault, a global leader in information management and enterprise data protection.
