Once you have implemented cloud for your business, be it migration or adoption, it is essential to keep changes in track. Be it total revenue or cash flow, there have to be regular checks about the functioning of the implemented cloud model and continually assess the working of it to engage in best practices and check its governance. The Key Performance Indicators related to the costs for the Cloud System are to be measured on a regular basis and altered based on their performance and business metrics achieved through the system. Out of all the Key Performance Indicators, the cost-related ones and finance teams associated with the cloud environment are key figures to assess the IT Spend and cost savings after migration to cloud infrastructure. Here, we explain the top four Secondary KPI Parameters that help to gauge the cloud costs and associated cloud services to help you achieve business metrics.

Measuring Opportunity Cost to enhance Speed and Control of the Cloud Systems

Cloud Computing Services offer you several opportunities for scaling, automation, third-party integrations, and several other workload functions. Many cloud vendors and service providers provide similar functions at different pricing models. Hence, identifying the right cloud provider at a suitable price, considering the hidden costs and cost savings, becomes the first step in measuring the opportunity cost to ensure that the business goals are matched after the migration. Plans and services from many cloud providers that suit the required functions are compared and assessed to find the cost efficiency of the cloud journey. These comparisons are generally part of the concept of opportunity costs. After measuring the opportunity costs, it becomes for a small and medium-sized business owner to make the right choice for the cloud computing services. While this metric is usually left out in a general SMB plan, it becomes essential to get the right financial perspective of the migrated cloud system and becomes advantageous to understand several production possibilities to save time and increase the technical control over the infrastructure. 

Acquisition Rates and Cost per Customer

Cost per Customer is an essential part of Cloud Economics and Cost Efficiency. Cost per Customer is beneficial to understand the cost savings after the shift to a cloud infrastructure. After the shift, it is essential to analyse the scope of the ease of use of the services by the customers and understand the effectiveness of marketing activities of the SMBs. With cloud computing services, one can work with pay-as-you-go pricing models to help the business owner to upscale and downscale the cloud storage and functions based on the seasonal demands and customer needs. These rates are useful to measure the efficiency and profitability of the cloud model to fulfill the business deals and match the budgeted costs. This metric is useful to assess the benefits of the services from the cloud to customer acquisition, retention and scope for repeat business. 

Cost Per Ticket (Automation vs Manual and Proactive vs Reactive)

Raising tickets for customer service and assistance for problem solving becomes a commonplace with a cloud infrastructure. This metric is associated with problem management in a technology front of the cloud infrastructure. This is rarely calculated, stating reasons of confidence in the cloud service vendor or presence of IT staff. Hence, Cost per Ticket associated with each cloud vendor is noted beforehand. The cost of each problem ticket is noted as part of the cloud infrastructure costs.

Keeping in mind the nature of the problem, the ticket can either be proactive or reactive. While reactive problem management helps to investigate the root cause of the problem incident and solve the underlying reason of the fault in the cloud model, proactive models is useful to identify the possible risks and triggers in the system to lessen the scope for future problems in the system that happens along with ongoing cloud activities. Reactive Problem Management includes brainstorming and analyzing the current problem and ensures that the problem doesn’t recur using chronological analysis and fault isolation. On the other hand, proactive problem management includes trend analysis, detection of errors, affinity mapping, and risk assessments. 

Business Decision with respect to use of Open Source or Paid Tools

There are several options for using open source tools and paid tools for the cloud systems to function the workloads. One must ensure that these tools used match the cloud business goals and ensure that the purpose of migration to a cloud management technology is fulfilled. While open source tools are free, they come with their own price of integration issues, lack of consultation services from the developer community, and lower bug fixes and latest updates. With the lack of motivation to enhance the features of open source tools, stating lack of profit, open source tools, even if they satisfy the need, render useless in certain situations. But, it is not a must that one must use paid tools only for their cloud infrastructure. After assessing the need and the scope of scalability of the tool in the future, one can make an informed business decision about the choice of open source or paid tools for their cloud infrastructure. This is a key metric to measure because paid tools add up to the cloud costs while open source tools are free of cost with lesser benefits. 

The tickets raised can either have a automated and immediate AI Assistance to help in customer service or manual assistance. These are also calculated based on the services from automation or cost of man power, respectively. 

To ensure that the business goals are fulfilled over a period of time and ensure that the products are ready in time to market using the cloud technologies, one must keep these major cost-related KPIs in check and ensure that the cloud journey yields success to the business KPIs as well as those related to the cloud infrastructure. In order to ease out the business decisions on the cloud, one must keep these cloud metrics in check. To set up your baseline analysis metrics, custom reports to measure key figures on cloud cost savings, cloud readiness assessments, or forecast your cloud success based on cloud usage, book a consultation with our CEOs now! Measuring and excelling in Business Performance on cloud is just a click away for business users in a faster time!