Companies typically migrate to the cloud for several reasons. They usually move to improve efficiency, increase flexibility, and save money. Businesses can meet these expectations by planning and executing the migration effectively. Managing the new cloud environment is also crucial to maximize and maintain the migration’s potential benefits.
Organizations must consider the costs of cloud waste when determining the move’s real benefits. Cloud waste is paying for cloud resources and services that deliver no business value. Significant waste can quickly become very expensive, and in some cases, put sensitive data at risk.
We are going to highlight some of the most common causes of cloud waste that can wreck an IT budget and make decision-makers question the advantages of the cloud. After looking at the various ways waste can affect a company, we’ll examine three VAST solutions that can help minimize waste and obtain the greatest return on their cloud investment.
Oversized Instances and Overprovisioning
Many organizations migrating part or all of their IT environment to the cloud are doing it for the first time. It can be challenging to determine the most efficient way to run familiar business applications on this new and different platform. Companies want to avoid disrupting business operations by contracting for enough resources.
Teams lacking migration experience often choose a larger instance than necessary to meet the environment’s demands. They may overprovision cloud resources to play it safe and pay for CPU, memory, bandwidth, and storage they don’t need. Organizations that fail to provision correctly can wind up paying more than they should for their cloud infrastructure.
Companies can address this issue and mitigate overprovisioning by regularly assessing cloud usage and right-sizing the environment to address real business requirements. Ideally, an organization should be able to resize its cloud resources without requiring architectural changes. Businesses can enjoy substantial financial savings through efficient right-sizing.
Idle, Forgotten, and Orphaned Resources
Companies may struggle to track their cloud resources and end up wasting money for a variety of reasons. Taken individually, the cost of each wasted resource may seem trivial. But they can quickly add up and significantly increase the monthly cloud bill. The following are examples of this category of cloud waste.
- Teams may leave development and test environments running when not in use, such as overnight or on weekends. They should turn them off when not needed and spin them up on demand to conserve costs.
- Application testing may create databases, logs, and snapshots that are mistakenly retained after testing is completed. Users must clean up these resources when they are done using them.
- Resources can become orphaned when they are attached to another resource that gets deleted. Teams must develop efficient plans to eliminate these orphans and reduce waste.
Cloud Storage
Cloud storage is essentially limitless, which is one of its great advantages over on-premises, limited storage solutions. Unfortunately, this quality can lead to a lot of wasted space. Companies may keep old logs, backups, and snapshots far longer than needed. Teams must implement storage management policies that support long-term storage only when required by business or compliance needs.
Mismanaged storage tiers are another way organizations unnecessarily increase cloud costs. Most providers offer several storage tiers which are priced in alignment with data availability. Prime tiers, where data is instantly accessible, are more expensive than archive tiers, which may take time to recover. Teams should review tier usage and adjust it to reflect operational requirements.
The Wrong Pricing Model
Companies using the wrong pricing model for their cloud environment can waste significant financial resources. They may be running predictable workloads on-demand instead of using more cost-effective reserved instances. A business may also find itself unable to scale down to conserve resources when running variable workloads in a reserved instance provisioned ot handle peak demand.
The cost of migrating with the wrong pricing model can be substantial and negate the prospective financial benefits of cloud migration. Decision-makers without migration experience should strongly consider engaging third-party help to plan and right-size the move under the appropriate pricing model.
Lack of Cost Visibility
Companies may not be able to monitor cloud costs effectively. Waste can accrue silently until it appears on the provider’s bill. This lack of visibility makes it impossible for teams to identify and remove unused and underutilized resources. Organizations need a comprehensive monitoring solution that provides fine-grained information on cloud resource usage so they can manage it efficiently.
Duplicate Services
Modern, complex, multi-cloud environments also create opportunities for resource waste. Companies can inadvertently pay for similar services with multiple providers that could be consolidated to a single cloud platform. Teams engaged in Shadow IT increase costs and may be risking the security of confidential or sensitive information.
VAST Helps Your Business Avoid Cloud Waste
VAST IT Services offers several solutions to help you minimize cloud waste and maximize the value of your cloud investment. Our expert teams and strategic partnerships with leading providers and vendors let us help you optimize your cloud environment.
Our Migration planning and assistance services ensure you migrate to a right-sized instance that meets your unique business goals and requirements. We help you develop a comprehensive migration roadmap that delivers a scalable, flexible environment to support your workloads while controlling costs. Once the plan is finalized, we help carry it out and replicate your applications to the cloud.
Our managed public cloud services help you unlock the full potential of the public cloud. VAST’s engineers work with you to optimize your cloud presence and ensure smooth business operations. We can augment and extend your IT department, fill skill gaps, and minimize waste by implementing cloud management best practices.
VAST View is our comprehensive cloud management platform that covers all aspects of cloud migration, from planning to optimization, governance, and orchestration. The tool provides custom cost reports and cost and usage analysis that can be instrumental in reducing cloud waste and maximizing your ROI.
Get in touch with our cloud experts today and learn how we can help your business eliminate the common causes of cloud waste and save money.
