Cloud performance that fuels growth: cut costs, scale faster, reduce risk

Parallo’s co-founder Symon Thurlow shares practical ways SaaS teams can use cloud architecture and operations to drive growth. Drawing on years supporting SaaS platforms he discusses how you can extend runway, lift valuation multiples, and dilute less.

Key themes include: 

1. Growth, runway, and valuation
   Higher YoY growth earns higher revenue multiples and less dilution. Platform choices that improve performance and efficiency extend cash runway and free founders from constant fundraising.

2. Architecture choices: VMs vs PaaS
   Virtual Machine (VM) based setups scale in big, slow, costly chunks; platforms (PaaS) scale faster in smaller increments with less waste and lower effort.

3. APM and telemetry-driven auto-scaling
   83% don’t use application performance management, “driving with the lights off.”
   57% don’t auto‑scale; 72% of VM users don’t auto‑scale. That’s “money on the table.” 

4. Multi-tenancy beats single-tenant
   78% use multi‑tenancy; 22% don’t. Single‑tenant/on‑prem drives up costs of goods sold (COGS), ops overhead, and slows updates. Overcome uncertainty with evidence from your customers’ verticals; multi‑tenancy is now the competitive norm.

5. Availability and disaster recovery
   At minimum, replicate data and be ready to deploy to another region. 23% currently do nothing - cheap insurance is available.

Key takeaways:

• Migrate toward PaaS and multi‑tenancy to cut COGS, reduce ops load, and improve user experience.

• Turn on APM and telemetry‑driven auto‑scaling; don’t drive with the lights off.

• Use cloud reservations for your steady baseline to materially reduce spend.

• Formalise tech‑debt and security posture routines (monthly reporting, pipeline code scans) and plan for ISO 27001.

Tune in to the full session to learn how to apply these insights.