How the public sector unlocks cloud discounts and savings
The benefits of cloud are clear - increased flexibility, cost efficiency, and security to name just a few. However, as more and more organizations within the public sector look to move to the cloud, it becomes obvious how easily costs can rise and become out of control. When it comes to IT resourcing and planning, public sector organizations experience many challenges. Ever increasing pressures to optimize efficiency, combined with budget cuts and strict privacy protocols makes it near impossible for organizations to find an off the shelf solution that helps to effectively manage value and cost efficiencies. That’s where Cloud FinOps comes in. It’s much more than simply optimizing costs - Cloud FinOps becomes part of the organization, to help financial and technical teams work together to manage the demand for cloud on a day-to-day basis to gain financial control and predictability. In the past, offices in public sector organizations such as local council offices, university research centers or medical centers, would have been crammed with bulky servers to host data ‘on premises’. These servers are priced at one upfront cost, and the finance team would be able to accurately plan this into annual budgets. With cloud, the usage is charged on a minute by minute basis, and the cost can increase rapidly depending on a variety of factors. For example, a university that employs a number of independent researchers to work on a paper can now offer cloud usage so that they’re not restricted to a certain amount of storage through on-premise storage. However, with each of them now using the cloud for individual use, the usage and cost increase cannot be tracked or controlled easily by the IT department. Therefore, without good cost visibility and optimization, costs can quickly rise.
The benefits of a Cloud FinOps approach
Flexible payments It is not always possible to ensure that multiple departments across the organization are using the cloud in the most cost-effective way. We work closely with cloud providers such as AWS, to provide customers with discounts and tailored advice on reporting and cost control. We offer flexible payment options to simplify the use of cloud for organizations by providing concise invoices and additional payment methods to suit specific needs. We also understand that annual public sector budgets are not flexible and some projects run for several years which causes some hurdles for organizations. We ensure your flexible usage needs are met and your costs are managed so that you’re not tied into one fixed annual fee.
Gaining full visibility Understanding cloud costs and usage can be a minefield, and so we are there to remove the complexity of cloud cost management - reducing the time needed to manage cloud - and enabling public sector organizations to focus on other important areas of the business with the time they gain back. We provide access to stunning and interactive dashboards that can be customized with ease and without the need for technical skills. This enables multiple teams within an organization to gain clarity of their cloud usage and spend. To learn more about our dashboards, click here.
Working with a trusted partner Strategic Blue holds an AWS Education competency which shows that we are recognised by AWS as a partner who has expert knowledge of providing significant value to education customers. We are also a Crown Commercial Service approved supplier on the latest G-Cloud contract, which allows UK public sector organizations to buy cloud-based computing services with confidence.
The University of York stays optimized in the cloud York University is a highly prestigious university in the UK. A recent shift in the way that students want to study - such as online lectures and access to learning materials online - prompted the university to transition over to the cloud. This led the university to become more agile to student needs, provide unlimited data access and ultimately set themselves up for further digitalisation in the future. Strategic Blue worked with York University to reduce the complexity of its monthly cloud billing, as well as the amount of time it took to manage cloud use internally. On top of this, York University saves a significant amount on its monthly cloud spend. To find out more about our work with the University of York, click here.
Enabling researchers to use the cloud to make a difference As well as helping universities to stay optimized, we also help individual researchers to harness the power of cloud by offering short-term flexible savings that fit their project lengths. We developed a cloud access entity with our customer, the University of California San Diego, which helps the computer science community access and use public clouds for research and education by delivering a set of managed services designed to simplify access to public clouds. We understand that organizations within the public sector have unique challenges and require a tailored approach, so get in touch to see how our solution can help you.