This blog is part of a series focused on quantifying the cost benefits of moving to the cloud in ways that aren’t always taken into consideration when evaluating ROI. This series will focus on four major areas: reducing purchase cycle overhead, security complexity and risk, repeatability, and finally, reducing development efforts. This third blog will focus on increasing repeatability. The estimates provided are based on a financial service company with $100 million in revenue in order to provide a perspective on savings.
Repeatability in the cloud means having the ability to quickly replicate processes, setups, and environments across different projects, products, and locations. It encompasses everything from reducing the time and labor required to launch a new product to easily expanding into new geographic markets and even creating effective disaster recovery scenarios.
The common challenge with these scenarios in an on-premises environment is the immense cost and effort required for planning and execution. For many companies, these costs can easily soar past $500,000 and even reach several million dollars. However, the cloud offers a way to dramatically reduce these expenses by providing a more efficient, repeatable approach.
1. Reduced Labor Costs with Repeatable Processes
In an on-premises setup, launching a new project or product often involves manual configuration of hardware, software, networking, and security policies. Each new launch is a time-consuming, labor-intensive process that requires significant input from IT teams, network engineers, and security analysts. By contrast, the cloud introduces a level of automation and repeatability that slashes these labor costs.
With cloud services, companies can use Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to define their entire infrastructure in reusable templates. This means that once a setup is designed and tested, it can be replicated with just a few clicks or lines of code. The result is a dramatic reduction in setup times—often from weeks or months to just hours. For example, if launching a new product traditionally required $300,000 in labor costs, using repeatable cloud processes could cut that down by 70% or more, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.
2. Tooling and Automation: Cost Efficiency at Scale
The cloud provides built-in tools and automation capabilities that allow companies to streamline operations and reduce costs. Services like AWS Cloud Development Kit enable the repeatable creation and deployment of complex environments, including ensuring compliance in sensitive environments and dramatically reducing costs in testing environments. This automation not only eliminates the need for expensive, custom-built on-premises tools but also minimizes human error, further reducing labor costs.
Additionally, disaster recovery and geographic expansion scenarios benefit immensely from this repeatability. Instead of purchasing and configuring hardware for each new region or recovery site, cloud environments can be cloned and deployed with minimal effort. This repeatability can lead to cost savings of 60-70% compared to traditional on-premises methods.
3. Faster Time-to-Market Means Labor Savings
Repeatability in the cloud doesn't just cut costs; it accelerates time-to-market. When launching a new product or entering a new market, time is money. The faster you can deploy infrastructure, the sooner your teams can start generating revenue. In a traditional on-premises environment, it’s not uncommon for setup and deployment to take 3-6 months, consuming vast amounts of labor and budget. In the cloud, with automated, repeatable processes, that timeframe can shrink to a matter of days or weeks, drastically reducing the associated labor costs.
The Bottom Line
The real-world value of cloud repeatability is undeniable. By eliminating manual processes, leveraging automation, and reducing the need for custom tooling, companies can save hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars annually. For executives looking at the true ROI of cloud migration, these repeatability benefits provide a compelling case for how the cloud can transform operational efficiency and drastically lower both labor and tooling costs.
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