How CIOs Can Use Cloud Services To Navigate Economic Turbulence

Companies around the globe continue to face a range of macroeconomic headwinds, from high input costs and rising interest rates to lingering supply chain disruptions and turbulent geo-political conditions. Whether this results in a prolonged recession or a more temperate slowdown is yet to be seen. Either way, it’s reasonable to expect a more challenging economic environment in 2023, and IT organizations won’t be fully isolated from the resulting business impact. How can CIOs get in front of whatever storm awaits? Cloud services can play a critical role.

For the last three years, IT organizations were forced to be highly reactive amidst economic and social turmoil. Businesses are only now returning to being proactive and strategic. The opportunity is for IT organizations not only to endure the economic storm but to emerge from it in an even stronger position. Here are four areas where CIOs should consider investing resources in 2023 to manage costs, increase responsiveness and build resilience.

1. Optimize your cloud spend

You can’t manage what you can’t measure. The first step is to get a handle on your cloud spend. This is particularly difficult to do in a multi-cloud environment spanning private and public clouds, where each cloud exists in its own silo. This makes it challenging to obtain a holistic view of spend across clouds. Remember, it’s not about reducing total spend so much as ensuring that what you do spend is allocated as efficiently as possible.

Look for software solutions that analyze your cloud spend in a granular way, down to the application level, including the application’s dependencies. If you have a multi-cloud environment, you’ll need a solution that can compile spend data from all the private and public clouds you use. These insights help you decide whether to migrate workloads to a different cloud to reduce spend, identify waste or help you achieve an optimal balance between, say, cost versus performance for a particular workload.

2. Extend the capabilities of your on-premises data center

Most companies are not planning to migrate all of their apps from their on-premises data centers, and for good reason: once up and running, an on-prem data center (or private cloud) can be more cost-effective to operate than public cloud infrastructure. In some cases, it can also provide more security, control and visibility. The downside is that traditional data center scale-up architectures hold you back from achieving a scale-out cloud operating model with the high resiliency, agility and efficiency that hyperscalers offer. That’s a potential roadblock during an economic downturn because your IT organization cannot respond as quickly to rapidly changing customer needs.

Fortunately, data centers can be modernized so you can get the best of both worlds: the cost-efficiency, heightened control and security of a typical private cloud, coupled with the agility and scale of public cloud. Look for data center modernization solutions that bridge your private cloud to the best services available in the public cloud, and allow you to scale resources on demand. Also look for solutions that empower you to manage resources from one centralized location across private and public environments. This makes it more efficient for your current staff to operate in a multi-cloud environment without proprietary appliances or tickets to deploy workloads, and while maintaining Zero Trust.

3. Strengthen ransomware defense

Economic downturns may spur a sharp rise in cyberattacks. Regulatory DataCorp (now Moody’s) found that cybercriminal activity rose 40% in the two years following the peak of the previous recession. Many companies initially focus on shoring up defenses at their endpoints and perimeter, which is critical, but once inside, threats such as ransomware can move laterally — hackers find a way deep into your networks with malicious code that masquerades as normal application activity, using legitimate ports and protocols. In one study, 44% of intrusions moved in this way.

To help find and evict threat actors before they do serious damage, implement solutions that not only look at what connections are being made, but also understand what is happening on those connections to differentiate normal application behavior from malicious activity. That way, you can better detect when the attacker is moving laterally to find something they can exploit.

You also want to ensure you have a non-disruptive disaster recovery solution in-place to ensure business continuity, just in case. For this, a cloud-based disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) solution is often ideal, as it eliminates the need for on-premises DR infrastructure that wastes energy because it is rarely used.

4. Unify your teams with a cloud operating model to do more with less

In a tightening economy when headcounts are reduced, hiring is frozen and skill gaps persist, interoperability and automation are critical to augment existing resources. Yet even as companies start to automate their tech stacks as part of their digital transformations, IT still requires tickets. This breaks the automation and agility of a true cloud operating model. The lack of consistency and siloed nature of Dev, Sec and Ops functions across private and public clouds can also lead to inefficiency, regulatory fines and unforeseen costs.

By improving your visibility and implementing consistent operations across clouds and apps, your existing teams can be more productive. Consider a platform approach to all of your cloud services, which provides a better employee experience and can aid in retention.

The time is right to prepare your organization for whatever economic challenges are heading toward us in 2023. Rather than see this as an obstacle for IT to overcome, view it as an opportunity to deliver more value and better position your company for what follows.

Learn more about VMware Cross-Cloud services, a portfolio of SaaS solutions to build, run, manage and help secure your applications on any cloud.