4 Ways Your Company Can Optimize Cloud Costs

Cloud is growing every year.

According to the ‘Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker’ report by IDC, cloud spending is expected to increase 6 times by the end of 2020. While IT is cutting traditional hardware costs, the spend on cloud services has increased multifold. A Gartner research says that cloud waste will hit over $14 billion this year.

Businesses usually over-spend on cloud computing because of over-provisioning. Your company must identify what it needs — and how scalable and agile those requirements are.

We know that forecasting your requirements isn’t always easy — and, cross-comparing cloud providers’ costs can be quite overwhelming. Working with an experienced cloud services partner can offload most of the cloud optimization cost process, here are a few initial steps you can take to manage better your cloud spend.

1. Finding Under-utilized Relational Databases/Instances

Amazon RDS, Azure SQL, and Google Cloud SQL — all offer valuable relational database management. Idle databases can consume a considerable amount of cloud spend. To reduce unnecessary expenses, we must perform continuous strategic cloud monitoring of the relational databases for idle database instances.

No matter if you delete the instance, take a snapshot, or choose to continue paying for the instance — it will all depend on the data it retains and why it has become idle. We would recommend the configuration of your relational databases to identify idle database instances.

2. Setting Up Lifecycle Management Policies

Virtual machine sprawls are talked about very often. These are basically unmanaged out-of-date instances that can waste valuable resources. Our team usually recommends setting up of strong lifecycle management policies for cloud optimization.

Your firm can utilize machine learning, giving alerts for scans — and monitoring and management of virtual machine lifecycles.

Another ideal thing is to combine your lifecycle management into an analytic reporting process — as it helps admins strategize around expiring VMs and if reclaimed resources can be utilized in new practical ways.

3. Amplifying Multi-cloud Workloads

Most organizations operate using more than one cloud provider. It makes sense because different cloud providers and cloud mixes — whether private, public, hybrid — can offer a more customized and beneficial set-up for the business.

However, the issue with multi-cloud is that it can be hard to align workloads to each cloud provider strategically.

Nevertheless, many providers offer discounts for meeting specific usage criteria. For example, Azure Reserved Instances maximize usage credit consumption — but it is harder to do when applications hosted using Azure are very few.

Maximizing multi-cloud workloads is fundamental to cloud cost optimization. A multi-cloud environment can reduce your cloud spending to a great extent when done correctly.

Using a cloud calculator, do regular cloud utilization check-ups and assess cloud management policies on a regular basis to ensure cloud cost optimization.

4. Build A Cloud Cost Optimization Strategy

If you don’t want to leave your business guessing, add more visibility and analytics on cloud computing usage. The analytics could likely revolve around overspending on resource allocation for the cloud.

Building a cloud roadmap that strategically matches workloads to providers, reduces complexity. Also, it is also vital to cloud cost optimization and the first step to ensure you aren’t wasting money on unnecessary cloud costs.

Find out more about how to build a cloud roadmap and how to assess your current cloud set-up with our team at GRIP I.T. Our cloud design and deployment experts will provide conversational advice and solutions that can be tailored according to your requirement.

Get in touch with our team today.