Moving to the cloud can be a daunting transition for many organisations, and cost and return-on-investment are clear considerations for any decision-maker.

Once that move has taken place, it is vital that business leaders remain vigilant about operational efficiencies that can be applied, as well as ensuring their teams are equipped with the right culture and talent to deploy the new tools and systems successfully.

Here are seven suggestions to get started with.

Optimising cloud operations
With many organisations having moved from on-premise to cloud already, a lot of the demand in the market right now involves optimising infrastructure for maximum efficiency and cost savings, and equipping teams with the knowledge and capabilities they need to maximise ROI and derive best value for money.

This can include upskilling the talent within the organisation, ensuring business teams have the right culture in place, providing help in implementing an Agile methodology, and moving towards an agile mindset.

There is a growing demand for FinOps – that is, how organisations implement their cloud cost management and budgeting – and rightly so.

With the backdrop of current economic challenges, organisations are under significant pressure to tighten costs and improve their cost management in the cloud.

FinOps supports transformational development, with the result that teams understand the price of operating in the cloud, how it is consumed, and the impact of turning things on and off.

Investigate savings plans
The big three cloud providers – Amazon, Microsoft and Google – offer savings plans which give customers the best pricing depending on what they commit to spending over a given time frame. By giving careful consideration to how much your business can commit over a period, you can optimise the savings available from these plans.

Explore right-sizing
Organisations should pay due attention to right-sizing their cloud capabilities to better reflect their activity. For example, a business may be using 10 CPUs when in fact it only needs 2 CPUs, therefore finding an opportunity to cut back on costs.

Pay-as-you-use
Many companies use the cloud for testing and development systems. Depending on the nature of the organisation, the cloud doesn’t need to be on 24/7, so businesses could actually be turning cloud capability off, thereby boosting efficiencies and honouring the essential nature of cloud as a pay-as-you-use service.

Joining a new ecosystem
Migrating from on-premise to cloud infrastructure brings with it the advantages of the wide ecosystem that opens up to your business.

The moment you move your workflow to one of the big three providers, your business becomes part of a network with thousands of potential technology partners that can help enable different functionality within your business, thereby developing new revenue streams or increasing security.

Upskilling employees
Furthermore, as a customer of one of the big three, it gives a great focus and resource for upskilling your business’s tech staff. The wealth of training, conferences and certification that these companies provide in relation to their platforms is an oven-ready CPD programme that makes sure your tech staff are up-to-date and getting the most out of every pound of your cloud infrastructure spend.

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A new approach
The agility represented by the cloud should become a core principle for all business operations. It has a ripple effect on other processes. For example, when a business implements cloud infrastructure, this might include providing the training to shift from a Waterfall to an Agile project management methodology.

The point being, when you move your business from legacy infrastructure systems, you are not just improving the operational efficiency of your systems; rather, it is a stake in the ground, banner-lifting signal to demonstrate that your business is entering a new era.