Overview
IT Cost Optimization strategies are oftentimes biased towards acquiring products and services at lower prices. However, this may not always provide desired outcomes.
Software as a Service (SaaS) has been around since the 1990s. The cloud and giant leaps in endpoint technologies have made the online delivery model for software more widespread recently.
But just because software is now more easily accessible than before, it does not necessarily translate into lower costs. The problem may be the pricing models that SaaS providers offer, the options they provide, or limitations in performance, resulting in customers paying more than necessary.
SaaS companies generally sell a bundled plan rather than granular services by themselves. This often results in customers paying upfront for features they may rarely or never use, increasing the overall costs.
Thus, products/services carrying a lower purchase price do not always translate to cost optimization for the customer due to the additional hidden costs.
Mithi helps reduce TCO (total cost of ownership) by 30% or more across several dimensions of the SaaS offering. We help lower the operational cost and free up resources while ensuring efficient, secure, and exceptionally reliable solutions.
These are some cost optimization strategies that Mithi employs for its customers:
1. Pay-per-use (pure consumption model)
We feel very strongly about our customers paying only for what they use. Modern technology enables enormous flexibility to help meter and track usage of various resources and services.
Thus, signing up for an entire suite of products and paying upfront for unused/underutilized features/resources seems unnecessary.
Pay-Per-Use allows you to quickly adapt to changing business needs without upfront over or under-provisioning, thereby improving your responsiveness to changes. With a pay-as-you-go model, you can adapt based on your business needs and not on forecasts, enabling you to save up to 30% v/s provisioning upfront.
You could reallocate the saved money to other critical digital initiatives.
By using the cloud data management services of Mithi, a mid-sized BFSI company preserved historical data of about 900 ex-employees on Vaultastic, totaling about 100TB, saving the company over 350k USD (70%) annually on Software Subscription Fees (read the full review on Gartner Peer Insights).
2. Cost Optimization with Zero Downtime, Zero Maintenance, Zero Management
Part of cost optimization is ensuring that your users have access to the service when they require it.
Being unable to access a service contributes to delays and increases the time and costs of getting things done. Any form of downtime also means risking a loss of reputation with your customers.
At Mithi, the carefully designed architecture supporting our services ensures no compromise on the available resources to run the service, with adequate security and redundancy to ensure 99.9+ uptime.
Any human intervention required for maintenance and management of the system slows things down and adds to the chance of breakdowns due to human errors—the resultant stoppage of work and the need for rework can increase costs.
Mithi updates and manages the cloud platform automatically and frequently, therefore, requiring minimal human intervention.
Thus our consumers are assured of zero compromises on performance and reliability at par with the best industry standards but without high subscription charges.
3. Hybrid setups
A hybrid setup combines the on-premise (private) setup with the cloud to leverage the best of both and gives a way to stage the migration to the cloud.
Another form of hybrid setup could be where two different platforms coexist and work in sync. The users are segmented between both platforms to optimize costs based on the specific needs of each set of users.
E.g., an email setup splitting the users in a 30/70 ratio between a high-cost email service and Mithi SkyConnect, an organization could be looking at savings of about 48%. With a 50/50 ratio, the savings are about 37%. With an additional 15-25% savings by opting for a consumption-based billing model with daily metering.
4. Cost Optimization with Open Standards and wider Choice
Open standards refer to technology that is available to all.
Since we use open standards as a base for our services, we can bypass the need to depend on a single vendor for proprietary tools.
Since we are not reliant on the grant of access to proprietary standards or tools and instead make use of free-to-use standards, we can optimize the costs of our offering to the customer.Â
Open standards also mean a wider choice of (free or paid) clients, tools, and addons, helping our customers further optimize cost.
5. Save on Migrations/Data Transportation costs
Mithi leverages the Legacyflo data migration tool to move large volumes of email data automatically and reliably from your legacy and active environments to the cloud.
Hands-free automated import and export of data can vastly improve your teams’ productivity and reduce risks while moving business-critical data.
We recently migrated 50TB of email data from G Suite to Vaultastic for a BFSI customer in about five days with near-zero human intervention. Using traditional methods, this would take months.
6. Cost Optimization with Multi-layered security
Security breaches can be very costly in terms of compliance, reputation, and critical data loss.
The global average cost of a data breach is $3.86 million (IBM)
Besides a multi-layered secure configuration for the entire cloud platform, Mithi ensures a tight Vigilance and Resilience loop to ensure the system isn’t compromised by new threats, reducing the supervision needed to maintain a secure setup.
7. Complete life cycle management
Mithi’s complete life cycle service model includes designing, building, marketing, delivering, and providing necessary support for our products.
From free solution consulting to automation of migration and management workflows to easy integration with other business applications to automated upgrades, Mithi delivers end-to-end service support to minimize or eliminate the need for subscribing to additional services.Â
8. Storage Cost Optimization
With data growing at a rapid rate, storage costs can quickly grow to unsustainable levels.
By providing a way to automatically move infrequently accessed data into lower-cost storage and enabling easy pruning of non-essential data, we help customers reduce their costs of carrying data without compromise on regulatory compliance or productivity.
In addition, the Vaultastic platform also delivers up to 47% de-duplication levels, directly resulting in cost optimization for the long-term preservation of data.
Conclusion
By looking at the costs incurred by the user across the whole life cycle of the product, optimising costs at every stage and not just the subscription price, Mithi is able to deliver a lower overall total cost of ownership (TCO) to customers.