Since the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, cloud adoption now stands at an all-time high. The dramatic shift to remote work standards created an urgent need for businesses to maintain operations through the cloud. But the question that continues to puzzle businesses is how they can make their scalable, reliable, and secure cloud solution more cost-effective.
In 2021, strategic and enterprise-level cloud technologies are at the forefront. In fact, more than 90% of organizations report that at least one of their dedicated IT environments runs on the cloud. And this is where cost containment of cloud solutions comes into the picture.
Cloud Cost Optimization Improves Your Ecosystem
Gartner notes that cloud spending increased by almost 20% in 2020 and will grow at 23% in 2021. It makes sense for businesses to make their cloud computing solutions more optimized using modern IT infrastructure. Despite the nature and size of the business, cloud solutions come with a wide range of benefits. This makes it all the more important to focus on essential cloud cost optimization strategies. Ultimately, effective cloud cost optimization makes your cloud ecosystem more robust over time.
Why Cloud Spending is a Major Problem
Cloud pricing, market dynamics, and redundant organizational insights can all have an impact on cloud costs. Many IT experts highlight that cloud cost management has become a major issue to run cloud-based applications. In fact, many companies spend on a good chunk of money cloud that exceeds their budget.
Cloud Cost Optimization Best Practices
The harsh truth is that many companies don’t have a strategic approach to manage and optimize cloud costs. As an IT leader, you should focus on the best cloud cost optimization practices for your company.
Identify Unused Resources
One of the best ways to optimize cloud costs is to determine unused or inactive resources. Most developers utilize a temporary server to take care of various functions and then forget to switch it off. On the other hand, developers often forget to get rid of storage connectivity after deletion.
In fact, these instances are more common than businesses realize in modern-day IT departments. So, your cloud cost optimization approach should be to add an identification parameter for inactive, unattached, and unused resources until their elimination from the system.
Consolidate Unused Resources
Your next course of action should be to consolidate the active resources to further optimize cloud costs. Your tactic should be to spot cloud anomalies in computing instances. Since most businesses have data centers, cloud administrators should operate at a low level and create room for potential traffic spikes. Also, take advantage of cloud load balancing, on-demand features, and autoscaling to improve your overall computing powers.
Review Multi-Cloud and Single Cloud
When it comes to cloud administrators, it can be tricky to size instances in the cloud environment. So, opt for suitable-sized computing services right from the start. At the same time, figure out whether your business needs a single or multi-cloud solution to run and main operations. Unlike multi-cloud, businesses also lose a lot of volume discounts in a single cloud solution. But most organizations go for a multi-cloud approach to increase availability and accessibility.
Use Heatmaps
Heatmaps are one of the most vital tools you can use to optimize cloud costs. As a visual tool, heatmaps are ideal to spot ups and downs in your computing processes. It will help you understand the actual demand and minimize cloud costs over time. For instance, you can use a heatmap to figure out whether or not the cloud development services are secure enough to shut down during weekends. Ideally, you should automate scheduling cloud instances to optimize costs.
Price Optimization
Once you’re aware of your active resources needs, invest in price competitive and optimized tactics like Reserve instances that come with heavy discounts on prebooking cloud capacity. In fact, your RI savings can top over 70% of savings than on-demand traditional pricing models. Opt for flexible cloud pricing models that offer cost management opportunities and alternative plans to save total cloud expenses.
Final Thoughts
In essence, cloud cost optimization is the subtle art of creating a balance between cloud expenses, performance, and maintenance. Cloud spending can spiral out of control and “how” businesses minimize cloud spending cuts back mismanaged resources.
Also, it improves your capacity to process operations on the cloud and focus on suitable-sized cloud computing services. In retrospect, businesses that want to attain cloud cost optimization will need to gain more visibility over their existing cloud accounts and as well as future deployments.
You can count on VAST for top-tier cloud cost optimization strategies, forecasting and budgeting, cloud cost analytics, financial governance and reporting. VAST provides complete cloud management services through Vast View that covers cloud optimization.
