The Doppler Quarterly Special Edition 2019 | Page 41

Identifying the Types of Savings
Start by defining the hard benefits of cloud in terms of direct and visible cost reductions
and efficiency improvements. These costs are typically easier to identify and easier to
assign a clear value to.
Soft savings are those value points that are more challenging to accurately quantify, but
can be as valuable, if not more valuable, than cloud’s hard savings. Any holistic cloud
economics evaluation should have a thorough analysis of both hard and soft savings.
Hard Savings
• Reduced spending on compute,
storage, networking, security
• Avoidance of hardware and
software purchases (CapEx)
• Reductions in operational costs,
backup and DR
• Reduction in operations-
oriented personnel
Soft Savings
• Reuse of services and applications that
allow you to define and redefine solu-
tions using the same cloud service
• Increased developer productivity
• Improved customer satisfaction
• Ability to change business processes
quickly around new and emerging
opportunities
• Increased global reach
How Much Does Human Error Cost You?
A key savings that is often overlooked is cost avoidance. You may notice that cost avoid-
ance is not listed in the grid above. This is because cost avoidance can land in either
hard or soft savings. Some mistakes are easier to quantify (such as having your e-com-
merce platform go down for an hour on Black Friday), but others, such as an impact to
your reputation, are much harder.
The cloud’s ability to help enterprises avoid costs is extremely powerful. For example,
many of our clients are using various levels of cloud and DevOps to improve uptime and
make operations, development and deployment much more efficient.
If you do not take the time to understand how much a lack of automation (and ensuing
human error) is costing your company, you are missing a major opportunity to reduce
future costs.
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