How UpCloud can help you optimize operations and minimize risks

‘Uncertainty’ has been the business buzzword of the 2020s so far, and the turbulence isn’t over yet.

It’s a sign of the economic times that businesses all over the world are weighing up their appetite for growth, but as our CEO Antti Vilpponen put it in a previous blog post, ‘wise management minimizes risk’.

It’s clear that businesses could use some wisdom now. A combination of pressure from investors, a need for cost-cutting, and global political uncertainty have impacted businesses of all kinds including cloud services.

Optimization for Cost, Efficiency, and Performance

But while this might be the time to cut costs, it is certainly not the time to cut performance. 

Traditionally, tech departments that may have been more focused on growth are now looking for ways they can minimize operational expenditure and maximize earnings.

This is something we are seeing on a daily basis, as businesses ask us how we can help to keep cloud costs down without sacrificing performance.

Often, these businesses set up their current environments with another provider years ago and never really looked back. But they have now started to question the costs involved.

Many now realise they haven’t used anything like the full capacity of the services they are paying for – and are now asking themselves why they are paying for capabilities they don’t need. 

So many businesses are now looking for ways to optimize.

Many who are using services from big-name cloud service providers are looking to migrate some of their databases if not their full environment. 

In one example, by directly migrating their database from a hyper vendor to UpCloud, one company found they could bring down the cost of their online operation by 60%. In fact, by optimizing their architecture even further, they could see even bigger reductions. In this case, they would utilise our Managed Database Services (DBaaS) product. 

Meanwhile, one company that has partially migrated its environment is UK business Hack The Box.

Hack The Box is an EdTech company offering cybersecurity upskilling, certification, and talent assessment, which allows organisations to run hacking simulations to learn about cybersecurity. They recently moved part of their workload to UpCloud and saw an increase in performance straight off the bat. 

This shows that you don’t have to migrate all of your workloads to see a significant impact.

A Cloud Service That Adapts to Changing Needs

Of course, that isn’t going to be the right option for every business. Smaller enterprises may not have the capacity to switch to a multi-cloud set-up. They might also require a fully-managed service providing both cloud and container orchestration services, too.

That’s one of the reasons we’re seeing such interest in our newest product, Managed Kubernetes, which will enable us to serve cloud-native companies at an even better price-performance ratio.

UpCloud’s Managed Kubernetes is our newest fully-managed product, allowing users to quickly build fully-scalable and flexible container environments without having to worry about their maintenance. It allows users to leave all the work of a Kubernetes control plane to us, while also having full control over their data plane – which means full control over costs.

On the other hand, larger businesses running heavier workloads may already be using Kubernetes, and now require a cloud service provider that can manage this as well.

These two use cases are the flip sides of the same coin. As the cloud matures, businesses are starting to see that there isn’t just one solution to every problem. All businesses have different needs, and the traditionally bigger cloud service providers aren’t necessarily right for every company.

What businesses need is flexibility.

As they adapt to the new economic reality, they must also adapt to political realities, too.

GDPR Compliance Right Out Of The Box

Risk aversion is taking hold amongst companies around the world, but the impact is being felt keenly in Europe. 

European businesses now find themselves stuck in the middle of a world where globalization has slowed. They don’t want to be at the mercy of cloud regulations in the US or elsewhere that can be changed by governments they have no ties to.

They also have to ensure they are compliant in their home market, too.

As a Finnish company, UpCloud’s services are GDPR-compliant right out of the box and come with a customer support service that sees the average enquiry receive a reply within 90 seconds.

But businesses also face pressure from other sources. Uncertainty exists not just in the political arena but in the economic one, too. Many are feeling the pressure to cut costs, especially growth businesses – who are looking at their financial projections with more and more scrutiny.

Uncertainty is not a good thing. But when it comes to cloud services it should be an opportunity for businesses to take advantage – and optimize for efficiency and performance as well as cost as they look to navigate future risks.

Erik Rehn
Head of Global Sales, UpCloud