Blog
Faster, smarter, cheaper? THIS is the key to optimal application performance
Efficiency, speed and cost savings in IT depend on one simple but often overlooked principle: locality. It may sound technical, but the impact is enormous. Properly applied, it can make software dozens, sometimes even hundreds of times more efficient. What's costing you a thousand dollars now in the cloud can be reduced to a tenner - or even a dollar - with the right approach.
My fascination with efficiency began when I was 13, behind a PDP-8. With only 4096 bytes of memory for 30 users, there was no other option but to write extremely economical code. What was pure necessity then is now an opportunity we often miss: by organizing data smartly, companies not only save a lot of money, but processes and people also work together more smoothly and pleasantly.
Because that's what it's all about: effortless interaction. In the physical world, we put our things within easy reach so that collaboration is intuitive and fast. For example, no one would store their cutlery with their nextdoor neighbor three blocks away. Right? And yet that happens in IT all the time. Data travels halfway around the world before reaching its destination, while systems and people function best when everything is close by. Time to make software work as smoothly as a well-oiled team puts the forks, knives and spoons in the cutlery drawer in your own kitchen.
How one simple optimization saved hundreds of thousands
Everyone who works with IT budgets knows the challenge: systems that once worked fine get bogged down at some point by growing data and processes. I saw a perfect example of this at a customer with an international price list.
Prices were managed in multiple currencies and had to be regularly updated to reflect exchange rates and price changes on a per-item basis. The existing approach was simple but inefficient: all prices in a given currency were pulled from the database, adjusted and then written back. Logical on paper, disastrous in practice. As soon as there were major changes - especially in dollar prices - the system ran into memory limits. The process had to be done manually and in parts, which meant that prices were updated too late and products were unintentionally sold too cheaply overseas.
By retrieving only the relevant price records and processing only the necessary data (article number, price date and new price), the amount of data was drastically reduced. The result? The process no longer jammed, ran more than ten times faster. Moreover, from now on price changes were always implemented on time. No more missed revenue due to incorrect prices, no more unnecessary operational burden and no more wasted resources. A classic case in which a smart IT approach had an immediate impact on profitability and saved hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Why old approaches don't work anymore
The example of the international price list played out some time ago. Since then, one factor in IT has only continued to grow: data. Applying Moore's law to data growth shows that in 2025 we will process over 6.5 million times more data than say 20 years ago. Over the same period, our local networks have become “only” 10,000 times faster.
What does that mean in practice? For example, an operation that took one second in 1990 would take nearly 11 minutes today - if we don't fundamentally change our approach. As businesses become increasingly dependent on real-time analytics, AI and large-scale cloud processes, the realization often lingers that how we process data is critical to performance and cost.
Many organizations struggle with systems built for a different era. Data is still unnecessarily passed back and forth between databases and applications. Just because we can doesn't mean we should, while modern technologies and architectures require smart optimization. Those who do not strategically manage data see costs explode and performance decline - and in a world where speed and efficiency make the difference, that is simply not an option.
In the cloud, the locality principle is even more important
Those who think that modern cloud infrastructure solves all performance problems are often in for a serious disappointment. In truth, the cloud actually introduces new challenges - especially when it comes to data.
Where local networks are already struggling to keep up with explosive data growth, the situation in the cloud is even more extreme. On average, the connection between your on-premises environment and the cloud is 100 times slower than an internal data center network. This means that every time you send data back and forth between your on-premises environment and the cloud, your performance and costs increase exponentially.
This is actually a strange fact; we choose the cloud because it is supposed to give us benefits. Yet what I describe here is happening all the time. Many companies are migrating their applications to the cloud without redesigning their data flows. Consequence? Unnecessary data transfers, slow applications and skyrocketing egress costs. So, in the cloud, the locality principle doesn't just become more important - it becomes crucial.
Saving begins with measuring and optimizing
Cost savings in the cloud obviously doesn't start with blindly decommisioning resources, it starts with insight. Without good visibility into your data streams, you don't know where waste is. That's why the first step is measurement and analysis.
-
measuring and optimizing
Get a grip on your data by monitoring which flows generate the most traffic. Analyze which data is actually needed and which is just causing unnecessary costs and delays. Unknowingly, many companies move huge amounts of data for no functional reason.
-
Optimizing data traffic
Remove unnecessary data from your data streams. Often, complete information is sent back and forth, while only a fraction of it is used. If the data set is still large, compression can be a last resort, but the real gain is in preventing unnecessary transport.
-
Cleverly placement of processing
If large amounts of data do need to be moved, make sure that storage and processing are as close together as possible. This avoids delays and minimizes egress costs. Consider processing in the same cloud region or even on the same physical infrastructure.
By taking this approach, you not only drastically reduce your cloud costs - I see savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars annually in our daily practice - but you also improve the speed and reliability of your applications. And that's where smart IT makes the difference: no concessions, but cost savings as well as better performance. And ... happier users .
Ready to get a grip on your application performance?
Do you also suspect that your organization is paying unnecessarily for IT capacity that is not being used optimally? You are not the only one and there is something you can do about it. Slow applications, unnecessary data flows and insufficiently tuned architecture can be a thing of the past and with them the high costs and possible frustration of your team that depend on fast and reliable systems.
With our Application Health Check™, you'll have insight into how your applications are performing - in the cloud and on-premise - in no time. We identify bottlenecks, measure unnecessary data movement and show you where you can make immediate savings without compromising performance. For those who want to optimize further, our Application Optimizer™ offers concrete improvements that make your applications more efficient, faster and more cost-effective.
Wondering where your biggest savings opportunities lie? Schedule a no-obligation appointment and discover how you can reduce IT costs while making applications faster and more reliable. Make an appointment and take the first step towards a more efficient IT environment today.