PKA Technologies CEO On ‘Companies Coming Back From Public Cloud’
‘Companies are coming back from public cloud. They are finally being able to understand and analyze the hard costs that it really is,’ says PKA Technologies CEO Felise Katz.
PKA Technologies CEO Felise Katz says companies that once had “a cloud-first strategy” are now flocking back on-premises due to hidden cloud costs becoming unsustainable for many customers.
“Companies are coming back from public cloud. They are finally being able to understand and analyze the hard cost that it really is,” said Katz. “I’m not even talking about the egress monthly [fees] which can be big. These are companies who were really early adopters who had a cloud-first strategy that are coming back now.”
The Montvale, N.J.-based MSP specialist said customers’ cloud bills ballooned so rapidly that they are moving their IT back on-premises or in some type of hybrid or colocation environment.
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“CIOs are now getting these bills that are 5-, 6-, 7-times [what they expected],” said Patrick Shelley, chief technology officer at PKA. “So we were talking to them saying, ‘Great, you’re growing 5-, 6-, 7-times.’ They’re like, ‘No, we grew 10 percent. But our bill is growing because we give developers access to things.”
“When you give people access to an unlimited amount of resources and there’s no governance around it, they go wild wild west saying, ‘I’m going to spin up the craziest amount that I can and give myself the most resources I can for whatever I’m trying to develop,’” Shelley said.
Forgetting To Shut Off Public Cloud
One PKA customer, for example, forgot to shut off dozens of virtual machines in the cloud, which was costing them around $90,000 per month without noticing the error.
“So we’re doing an assessment and saw they had a block of about 75 VMs. We spoke and they say, ‘No that project was killed nine months ago,’” said Shelley. “It was in the cloud. They gave developers access and they spun something up. And then the project got killed nine months ago, but they didn’t shut it off.”
The customer was unknowingly paying around $90,000 a month for the last nine months of equipment that they just never shut off.
“You need governance. You need control. It’s like a wild wild west of someone just swiping a credit card, and no one is controlling it,” Shelley said. “CFOs are starting to question this stuff now. Very large customers are now coming back.”
On-Premises Consumption-Based IT
PKA Technologies’ CEO said organizations like the idea of consumption-based on-premises IT “where they have predictable costs, have it on-site, and you can also govern it.”
PKA Technologies is an HPE Platinum Partner as well as a top HPE GreenLake solution provider that made CRN’s 2023 MSP 500 list. The company’s PKASolveIT offering for HPE GreenLake provides consumption-based, pay-per-use model for on-premises environments. PKA provides professional and consulting services, along with networking, storage, server and data center optimization solutions.
“We’re having a lot of very positive conversations with customers right now. We can put them in a hybrid environment, but most of them go on-prem or in their colocation which improves compute and storage,” said Katz. “It’s a positive impact on everything.”