Cloud computing has a lot of advantages for businesses, but it has to be handled properly to get the most out of cost savings. Many businesses have experienced sticker shock when they transition to cloud computing and increase their offerings. The average cloud budget is $3.5 million for large enterprise organizations and $889,000 for SMBs (source). The increasing demand for cloud solutions has led to an increase in the prices of cloud providers.
Given this cloud environment, it is vital to have a cloud cost optimization strategy in place to make every gigabyte count. To get the most bang for your dollars, your cloud strategy should prioritize cost, and your plan should integrate all aspects of cloud computing. Keep reading to discover tips to help you manage your cloud expenses!
What is cloud cost optimization?
Cloud cost optimization is the act of reducing cloud resources by carefully selecting, deploying, and scaling the resources you use for specific cloud features. It’s a process which consists in minimizing cloud spending by identifying mismanaged resources and eliminating waste.
A smart cloud optimization strategy can show you what you are doing right and where you need to improve to get the most out of your cloud migration and IT spending. Cloud management is a never-ending process of improvement. The procedure can be used as part of continuous deployment (CD), which involves developers pushing code updates to particular portions of a cloud application regularly.
7 Ways to Reduce Your Cloud Costs
Here are 7 ways to reduce your cloud costs:
- Request cloud provider reports
- Cloud usage vs. business activity
- Resize according to your requirements
- Utilize automation strategies
- Schedule your cloud activity
- Review your usage with analytics
- Remove deprecated and unused items
1. Request Cloud Provider Reports
Observe the data on your cloud usage and costs in a format that is simple to query and follow over time. Cloud platforms can help with this. If you utilize Amazon Web Services, for example, the AWS Cost and Usage Report is an excellent place to start. You should consider creating AWS cost and usage reports every hour (CURs) to truly monitor your cloud storage.
If you fail to understand what is going on in your cloud environment, you will find it difficult to gather the data you need to compare costs and returns. This can lead to a lot of unnecessary spending.
2. Cloud Usage vs. Business Activity
Cloud platforms generate usage and expense reports that are tailored to their needs, not yours. The reports simply reveal how much of their cloud platform’s services you used over a certain period of time. However, they provide little information about how your firm did during that period.
Those reports, for example, do not show how much money you spent on a certain product, team, or customer. Their cost vs. return analysis does not include the contextual business data required to fully grasp your cloud services usage.
With this information lacking, you may not know:
- If spending more of your cloud budget on a specific product or customer will yield more returns;
- If it is possible to raise prices or rates;
- If there are costly features that most people do not use;
- If switching platforms could be a cloud cost optimization strategy;
- Whether re-factoring your applications could resolve issues in your cloud computing.
3. Resizing to Your Requirements
One of the biggest benefits of cloud computing is the freedom to scale up or down as needed. Simply purchase what you require and make additional provisions when circumstances change. This saves you from investing resources in capacities that you may not require in the future. Make sure you are not making the same error with your cloud deployments by overbuying capacity when scaling is so simple.
The primary goal is to maintain optimal cloud computing, storage, and network settings to achieve maximum performance at the lowest possible cost. Failure to periodically resize your cloud obligations can quickly result in skyrocketing expenditures. Review your requirements regularly and resize as necessary!
4. Utilize Automation Strategies
Use cloud computing automation to install, configure, and manage your cloud services in the most efficient way possible. Backup and storage, security and compliance, code deployment, settings, and configurations can all be automated to reduce the amount of human involvement required. This reduces manual errors while also allowing your technical support team to focus on more strategic business operating costs.
Dynamic resource allocation can assist in balancing demands and avoiding overuse. Security sweeps that are automated can look for potential security flaws. Cloud orchestration allows you to integrate automated workflows into a single operation that is then automatically executed.
5. Schedule Your Cloud Activity
Schedules can be set to start and stop based on workloads and work hours. There’s no point in keeping the resources active and paying for them if no one is going to use them. This cloud technique can also be used for projects and deployments. Certain resources may only be required to be operational for short periods.
6. Review Your Usage With Analytics
The dashboard and data provided by your cloud provider might serve as a starting point for cloud cost optimization. You can also use a Cloud Management Platform (CMP) to look at extensive cost modeling and more granular reporting. Continuously used resources are suitable candidates for RIs and Committed Use programs. When you will need the capacity, this can help you save money.
7. Remove deprecated and Unused Items
Your company’s cloud data center most likely has a lot of useless data. Because you are paying for storage space, it is a good idea to reduce your data regularly by considering the relevance of the saved data.
Check for orphan instances, volumes, or cold data that is not being used for current projects.
DataIntell offers a centralized data solution that monitors and provides the appropriate tools to navigate and find patterns that are potentially costing you thousands of dollars in storage costs every year. Duplicate files or documents unused for over 6 months are easily identified thanks to our analytics services.
Strategy for cloud cost optimization
Users mention faster deployment, ease of upgrade, the total cost of ownership, cheaper technical support costs, and lower upfront expenditures as the top benefits of cloud computing. It remains that the expenditures of Internet security, identity management, IT management, maintenance, and data migration can all mount up.
Make sure your cloud approach incorporates regular monitoring, automation, scheduling, and resizing when it comes to cloud costs and planning. While cost-cutting measures should never jeopardize your ability to meet business demands, streamlining your processes can help you save money and improve your productivity. Contact DataIntell to find cloud cost optimization solutions that are adapted to your industry and operational needs.
