Why operational efficiency matters now

As businesses consider how to weather the road ahead, many are finding they need to make tough decisions about how to allocate resources. For most, it’s not simply about spending less, it’s about knowing which projects to prioritize, even if with limited funding, in order to maintain business continuity and ensure longevity.

But this is easier said than done. Evaluating which projects will generate the right business outcomes and cost efficiencies presents a specific set of challenges, such as:

• Unpredictable business conditions—Businesses must keep pace with dramatically changing requirements to survive, and thrive. To innovate quickly, IT teams need solutions that decrease their time to market, while also providing the agility and scalability they need to address any requirement thrown their way.

• New investment needs—Businesses must adapt to new business models while also ensuring their teams have the tools they need to be productive from locations outside the office. IT must now prioritize projects that weren’t in the budget to ensure the survival of the business and the productivity of their workforce.

• Limited visibility and control—Not all businesses have the complete picture of their IT spend to make educated decisions about where and how to reduce costs, or whether to reinvest in other strategic areas. IT needs granular visibility and intelligent services that take the guesswork out of cost and resource optimization, while also providing robust governance that reduces the risk of overspending.

With current business conditions, it’s essential to be empowered with facts, knowledge, and best practices so you can prioritize your investments and optimize your costs. This paper provides an overview of the key areas we see our customers prioritizing their investments, creating operational efficiencies, and the many ways Google Cloud can support you in this journey. Read on for Google Cloud operational efficiency best practices, which include:

• Adopting Anthos for agility and IT cost reduction

• Driving greater agility and a higher return on your ERP investment by migrating SAP to Google Cloud

• Avoiding costly hardware refreshes and reducing on-premises infrastructure costs by migrating VMs to the cloud

• Modernizing your data warehouse for scalability and seamless access to advanced analytics

• Migrating your on-premises Apache Hadoop clusters for easier and more cost-effective management

• Running specialized workloads in the cloud with a costeffective and scalable Bare Metal Solution

• Migrating Windows workloads to increase agility and decrease on-premises investments

• Offloading your mainframe environment and embracing a modern architecture for scalability and cost efficiencies

• Applying AI to rapidly respond to customers

• Moving beyond your data center

• Gaining more visibility and control with billing and cost management tools

• Transforming the way teams work together

Optimizing costs in the present, and planning for a more agile and scalable future in the cloud

For many businesses, the impact of COVID-19 has brought the benefits and limitations of their IT landscape into stark focus. As these businesses plan their way forward, many will need to consider how to meet the needs of their new business realities with limited resources.

This is a challenge ideally suited for IT—particularly at businesses overly reliant on legacy infrastructure. A recent McKinsey study1 found that these legacy systems account for 74% of a company’s IT spend while hampering agility at the same time. Making fundamental IT changes like migrating on-premises workloads to the cloud can reduce costs, increase agility, and pay ROI dividends down the line. These modernization tasks will likely look different for businesses of varying sizes, in varying industries. The options that cloud offers will let you migrate flexibly, on your timeline, whether you’re starting with VMs, your data warehouse, or the entire mainframe.

Adopt Anthos for agility and IT cost reduction

In times of uncertainty, you need an architecture that gives you the agility and flexibility to help you weather change—or even take advantage of it. New container-based “cloud-native” tools and services have emerged to serve this need, but enterprises need solutions from a trusted company that truly understands these technologies. These solutions can help you get started without any infrastructure change so you can develop, secure, and manage apps at scale across their growing hybrid cloud environments.