The rise in cloud computing usage received a major fillip this year. This was due to work from home imposed by the prevailing pandemic. According to tech research firm Gartner, the market for public cloud services is geared to grow at a modest 6.3% in 2020. This means it could reach nearly $260 billion.
A business invests money in shifting to cloud usage. But many a business who use cloud service may not accurately gauge expected costs and could be pleasantly surprised when they see their cloud bill. While the public cloud supposedly lowers costs than the capital investments of an on-premises data center, this can be true when one manages the cloud perfectly.
As sales volumes and margins have shrunk, Companies must deploy a policy for cloud systems that provide optimum service while balancing their cloud infrastructure and expense.
We will help you create a migration strategy to optimize performance and avoid unexpected costs and cloud migration risks. To maximize cloud investment and improve overall efficiency, companies must take a few important steps.
Determine Usage Based on Business Need
One has to gauge how the staff is utilizing the cloud system. This can help to determine the returns of shifting infrastructure to the cloud. This helps to assess the returns of opting for cloud migration. Usage can also be evaluated with time and if there is an increase or decrease over time. All functions and departments can be investigated on how cloud migration has reaped some benefits.
Check Cloud Infrastructure to Justify Spend
One has to understand how infrastructure bought for the business justifies requirements. One can gauge how it aligns with business requirements. And how it corresponds to spends. A business can also alternate with cloud security service providers to optimize the desired blend of cloud infrastructure and corresponding expenses. This requires having capability within the business to make such assessments.
Use Technology Expense Management (TEM) Tools
Even with thorough planning, assessment, and estimations of the service provider’s costs and services, cloud cost management can still be a task as the prevailing IT environment is always in an equation of growth and change.
A perfect way that one can keep control of usage expenses would be to continuously oversee them is through a technology expense management tool.
- These expense tools can effectively merge all data of usage and corresponding costs across all cloud vendors of the Company. This is assuming that many Companies work with multiple vendors. The data that the tools provide enable the identification of underutilized resources and hence can curtail unwanted expenditure.
- The tools also provide insights needed to locate cost-saving opportunities. The business can for example benefit from importing data across purchase or sales or logistics and tag it. It can then convert complicated and unclear data into relevant information.
- Once cloud costs and business users have been estimated, it is much easier to forecast costs or plan public cloud usage needs. To do this effectively, take the time to understand the vendor payment models and utilize an expense management system, to minimize costs and optimizing cloud services.
- The tool can also provide comprehensive scrutiny of how the network, computing, and all storage resources are being used.
Some Focus Areas to Cut Cloud Cost
To begin with, one must first spot wastage by uncovering the inefficient use of cloud resources. One can start pruning expenses cloud infrastructure cost if one can mark out primary areas that account for a lot of wastage in Cloud spend and incremental budgets. Following are ways to make inroads into managing costs.
One needs to ensure that teams must have a direct facility to check what they spending on. One can go overboard using up services. Hence, one needs to know exactly what one is spending monies on.
One must identify what one has and who takes ownership of it. We must always tag resources. This can be correlated to user ownership, the relevant cost center, and allocated time. This would give one a better grip on the origin of the spending. This kind of information can be used to gauge usage of the infrastructure when one gets detailed billing reports from the service provider.
Once one has a clearer picture of what spends are, then budgets can be allocated as per SBU or region or division. Doing this after establishing a few set parameters ensures that one is setting genuine and practical budgets that have been computed based on actual usage.
It’s also important to control employees from provisioning unauthorized resolutions from the open market. This can include software purchases, etc. from suppliers with whom no agreements are in place. Such suppliers may prove to be expensive in the long run or pricey to run at scale.
It is also possible that different regions especially in large organizations may have different services running. It has been observed that the cost of services can vary across different regions. So, one needs to ensure that one balances needs and requirements with running services in a given region within predefined costs.
Another possibility for controlling costs is the usage of instance scheduling. This requires starting and stopping instances using a planned schedule.
Another possibility for saving is through shutting down of environments on nights and weekends This can help in saving substantial amounts over time. One can evaluate which environments need to be provided with 24×7 availability. The rest can be scheduled with a shutdown accordingly.
One can manage the storage lifecycle by ensuring that one rotates logs and snapshots regularly and backup. One needs to remove unnecessary storage volumes that are in use any longer.
One can use a technological solution to reduce cloud operating expenses. This is through the use of containers. This technique is generally used by IT support teams by using a DevOps approach together with a container package application.
Thus, one needs to understand that the cloud is a utility. It therefore must be managed as such. All related expenses should get duly reported and allocated. Services must be optimized and mechanisms to check costs should be automated. When cost control is part of the strategy one can be assured of maximum optimization and ROI.
