The new year has only just started and already we've on-boarded a new client looking to reduce (and fix) their technology costs.

Then, last week, another potential customer reached out for assistance. They will be joining us at the beginning of March.

It's not that both customers had any significant performance issues with their previous cloud providers, the problem was two fold: cost creep and the Australian Dollar.

Both clients were paying overseas providers, one of them in US Dollars, the other in Australian Dollars which was constantly increasing most likely due to currency conversion since the core provider was US based.

Now the Australian Dollar is hovering around 60 cents USD, the challenge is maintaining (or increasing) infrastructure services whilst containing costs.

For both new customers, cutting current technology costs was near on impossible, however that scenario changed after talking to us :)

The first client had a long-term investment (contract due for renewal) with a US cloud provider to run their custom application in containers with a website portal and SQL Server database backend. Backups were a challenge (they were intermittently working and without reliable reporting).

The second client also operates a multi-layered application with legacy middleware, requiring traditional VMs to run services running on Windows and Linux machines. A little more complex and with a challenge for support since the application was more than 10 years old and a small developer firm had taken over the role of maintaining system functionality. There were no backups for individual parts of their system, only snapshots of each VM, which had never been restored or tested.

For the first client, we were able to cut costs by migrating them to Cloud365's Melbourne cloud platform, create a secure VPN to their Melbourne office for data transfer and off-site backups, enable monitoring and alerts for services and layers of the application as well as provide them with a staging/test environment which can be used for testing restoration of backups. We also provided a secure VPN with 2FA for developer access.

The first client will now pay around 55% of what they were paying their cloud provider, in Australian Dollars, including a staging environment, weekly intrusion testing for their front end website portal and round-the-clock technical support.

For the second client, their existing platform was hosted in Singapore and this requirement remained as staff are located in Australia and Singapore.

We were able to take snapshots of the existing VM infrastructure and redeploy in our Singapore Datacentre where the client's technical staff could test everything was working as expected.

The plan (currently underway) is to build a staging/test environment where further system backups can be restored and tested before migrating the system across from their current provider in March.

We were able to reduce the second customer's monthly costs by more than 40% whilst providing a staging environment, enabling a path for backups (to be taken and restored) in addition to all the regular included features of our service (backups, monitoring and alerts, intrusion testing, secure VPN, mail relay and round-the-clock HelpDesk Technical Support.

Both new clients will receive additional services they previous either did not have or were at extra cost.

When economic challenges call for finding new ways to reduce costs, technology infrastructure and cloud services are often overlooked.

In our experience this is due to a number of factors including complexity/understanding, vendor lock-in and previous (deployment) staff no longer working with the organisation. It's a shame as this often leads to the easier path of reducing or removing staff - a short term fix whilst technology costs continue to rise.

There is a better way and it doesn't cost anything to talk through technology options which almost always produce cost reduction opportunities, allowing businesses to get on with running their business, often deploying new services for customers whilst containging technology costs.

If you would like to explore opportunities to save on technology infrastructure and cloud services costs, talk to us.