The shift to cloud computing has dramatically transformed how organizations and businesses store, manage and analyze their data. The benefits of this shift are well-known: Moving to the cloud increases the potential to gain more value their data through faster access, greater scalability and cost-efficiency.

All plain sailing, right? Not quite.

As many organizations know, performance is only sometimes proportional to investment. In many cases, the cloud actually increases the risk of driving costs. So much so that according to research conducted by IDC, 80% of public cloud customers have taken some of their workloads off-cloud. Performance issues, unexpected costs and lack of control are some reasons why. The struggle of balancing benefits with the need to mitigate risk and ensure a continued return on investment is real.

The good news is that there is something you can do: With SAS® Viya®, you can keep your cloud costs in check.

Fact 1: SAS Viya helps organizations scope their cloud strategy ahead of time

Implementing a cloud strategy without proper scoping can lead to significant cost overruns and inefficiencies. Research shows that organizations without a cloud optimization process tend to overspend by 40% due to unmanaged costs, unexpected usage, suboptimal design, implementation, wrong-sized production and waste in development and testing environments, among other reasons. Viya helps you avoid this scenario by accurately scoping your analytics transformation before implementing your cloud migration strategy or supplementing the cloud strategy already underway.

Fact 2: SAS Viya on average achieves 30 times more value out of your cloud cost than competitors

Viya outperforms leading alternatives with optimized algorithmic performance right out of the box. But is this enough? When it comes to putting analytics into production, a few benefits must be assured:

• Efficiency.
• Accuracy.
• Repeatability.
• Scalability.
• Governance.

A SAS algorithm and responsible and ethical AI practices are tested for these qualities. SAS also provides openness as it integrates with open source and keeps incorporating open source algorithms that provide the same assurances with SAS. By embracing open source algorithms in every way, Viya enables analysts to pursue the best outcome every time, regardless of the algorithm and programming language of choice. Viya users spend less time coding, testing and interpreting, free instead to focus on delivering results.

Fact 3: SAS Viya provides detailed knowledge of consumption metrics and powerful insights

In the digital age, you have to understand your consumption metrics. This can unlock powerful insights that can benefit your organization in numerous ways. For instance, by analyzing your consumption metrics, you can gain an understanding of your cloud usage patterns, leading to informed forecasts of cloud cost and performance expectations. In turn, this helps identify areas for improvement. Plus, detailed consumption metrics enable teams to create a validated map of which workloads and data should migrate to the cloud and which shouldn’t. SAS Viya comes with ecosystem diagnostics that let you see which workloads consume the most resources and runtime in the cloud. Organizations can detect resource-heavy workloads early to improve performance and avoid issues.

You can also optimize cloud spending by using the insights provided by detailed consumption metrics. Through a thorough analysis of resource usage, you can identify areas of inefficiency or overspending to take corrective measures and optimize cloud costs.

The future of navigating cloud economics challenges

The outlook is promising, as organizations increasingly recognize the value and potential of the cloud. The cloud has become a powerful tool for using vast amounts of data, gaining practical insights and driving innovation. However, these opportunities come with a unique set of challenges in order to maximize the benefits of the cloud.

Fortunately, you can address these concerns with Viya. By using scalable algorithms, ecosystem diagnostics and detailed knowledge of consumption metrics, organizations can analyze their cloud infrastructure and identify areas of improvement. Viya provides such tools and technologies and is helping organizations optimize their cloud usage and manage costs effectively.