What Happens on the Back End Doesn’t Always Stay There
One of the prevailing ideas around cloud optimization is that, for the everyday citizen, it’s boring back-end stuff. You might register superior uptime, which is a good thing, but not necessarily one that’s fully appreciated by the front-end user.
What’s more, when things go wrong, front-end users, namely citizens, aren’t necessarily going to point fingers at the cloud. A good example of this happened recently with the massive AT&T breach. In essence, it was the company’s cloud provider, Snowflake, that suffered the breach. This is a bombshell in the B2B world and for investors. But for AT&T customers, the cloud is an afterthought. Their concerns about leaked data will be directed at the folks on the front end, namely AT&T.
There’s a similar dynamic with citizen services. There’s a lot more to be lost or won with something such as artificial intelligence, which is very much on citizens’ minds. Some folks embrace it, some are terrified of it. Unlike the cloud, though, everyone is quick to malign it and distrust it the moment something goes wrong.
Just because the cloud is by all appearances doing what it’s supposed to be doing — minimizing downtime, improving flexibility, reducing capital expenditures — doesn’t mean you’re done. There is more that it can do for citizens.
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Cost Optimization: Make Every Dollar Count
The most basic, and yet arguably most important, connection between everything you do in the cloud and the citizen experience is cost effectiveness. Agencies have budgets, often derived in part from taxpayers, and they are at the mercy of those budgets.
The biggest problem with the lift-and-shift migration model is that it risks putting many of the issues impacting performance and efficiency into the cloud, especially if you “set it and forget it.” This is arguably the No. 1 way we’ve seen cloud computing end up costing more money in the long run.
We much prefer the phrase “lift and shine.” The idea here is twofold. First make sure that you’re realizing cost savings, and that you’re holding your cloud provider accountable. Here are a few simple tips to achieve that:
- Implement smart financial management practices to gain visibility into cloud spending and optimize costs accordingly. This includes monitoring usage, identifying waste and right-sizing resources.
- Optimize data storage by archiving or deleting unused data and use the most cost-effective storage tiers.
- Re-evaluate every license cost after migration. There may be opportunities to tweak your operational stack and save money in the process.
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Performance Optimization: Maximize and Accessorize
The second aspect of “lift and shine” involves taking every opportunity to optimize the performance of your cloud environment. One the best ways to achieve this — especially for smaller jurisdictions — is to pick one cloud provider and accessorize around it. It’s better to focus on deeply understanding and optimizing a single cloud platform instead of trying to spread limited resources across multiple cloud providers. The most important thing is investing the time to really understand and leverage that platform’s capabilities.
The idea here is that you select something that meets most of your needs and selectively use other cloud services when necessary. By deeply understanding and optimizing your use of the primary cloud platform, you can get more value out of it than you would from multicloud environments that you don’t have the resources to fully utilize.
On the surface, this isn’t revolutionary advice. But cloud optimization can help you launch a cutting-edge citizen website that folds in AI. That’s the type of thing that citizens will notice, and it’s not achievable without cloud optimization.
