Reduce Your Cloud Costs with These 5 Strategies

As cloud adoption continues to increase, so are concerns around cloud cost management.

Cloud computing provides significant benefits for businesses, but they must be managed to take full advantage of cost savings. In a survey of more than 700 IT professionals, 64 percent report that optimizing cloud usage to save money was their top priority for the year ahead.

As companies migrate to cloud computing, many have suffered sticker shock as they expanded services. The average cloud budget is $3.5 million for large enterprise organizations and $889,000 for SMBs. SaaS (Software as a Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) make up most of those costs. 

Having a cloud cost optimization strategy in place is critical. Your cloud strategy needs to prioritize costs, and your plan should bring all aspects of cloud computing together to get the biggest bang for your buck. Below are a few strategies to help with your cloud cost management

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5 Ways to Reduce Your Cloud Costs

1. Re-Sizing to What You Need

One key advantage of cloud computing is the ability to scale up or down as business dictates. Just buy what you need and then provision more when things change. This prevents you from spending capital upfront to buy the capacity you may not need in the future. Don’t make the same mistake in your cloud deployments by overbuying capacity when it’s so easy to scale.

The overarching goal is to achieve maximum performance at the lowest possible costs by maintaining optimal compute, storage, and network settings. Failing to right-size or re-size your cloud commitments regularly can quickly lead to ballooning costs.

It’s a delicate balance to maximize workload without overspending. Regularly review your needs and re-size as appropriate.

2. Utilizing Automation Strategies

Take advantage of cloud automation that will install, configure, and manage your computing services wherever possible. Automating tasks such as backup and storage, security and compliance, code deployment, settings, and configurations can reduce the amount of human intervention that’s needed. This both lowers manual errors and allows your IT staff to focus on higher-level strategic business activities.

Dynamic resource allocation can help balance loads to avoid over-utilization. Automated security sweeps can scan for potential security breaches. Cloud orchestration can configure resources to combine automated workflows into a single process that is then executed automatically.

3. Scheduling Your Work and Workloads

If your company doesn’t conduct business overnight or on the weekends, you likely wouldn’t need to schedule employees to staff the office. If you did, your payroll would balloon for no solid business reason. 

You may be doing the same with your cloud computing if you aren’t scheduling your resources. You can configure schedules to start and stop depending on workloads and work hours. If nobody is going to use the resources, there’s no reason to keep them active and pay for them.

This can also apply this cloud strategy to projects and deployments. Certain resources may only need to be active for specific chunks of time.

4. Reviewing Your Usage and Using Analytics

Your cloud computing provider’s dashboard and analytics can provide a starting point for optimizing your costs. Look for obvious signs of under-utilization. You may also want to utilize a Cloud Management Platform (CMP) to look at detailed cost modeling to get more granular reporting.

Resources that are in use constantly are good candidates for RIs and Committed Use plans. This can reduce costs when you know you will need the capacity. 

5. Removing Deprecated and Unused Items

Think about your own computer hard drive. It’s so easy to store things that you likely have a lot of files stored that you won’t need again. Your businesses cloud data center probably contains a lot of unnecessary data as well. Since you’re paying for capacity, you should make it a regular process to trim or deprecate your data as it becomes obsolete.

You should also check for orphan instances, volumes, or containers that are no longer being used for current projects. Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs) can help distribute workloads and traffic, but you pay for it whether you use it or not. If you have no instances associated with your ELB, delete it.  The same goes for unassociated IPs and machine images that are no longer being used.

Be careful if you do delete items as they may not be recoverable at a future date.

Strategy for Cloud Cost Optimization

When it comes to cloud computing, users cite faster deployment, ease of upgrade, total cost of ownership, lower IT support costs, and lower upfront costs as the top benefits. Internet security, Identity Management, IT Management, Maintenance, and Data Migration costs can all add to your bill.

When it comes to cloud costs and planning, make sure your cloud strategy includes regular monitoring, automating, scheduling, and re-sizing. While cost savings should never be put in place that hurt your ability to handle business needs, optimizing your systems can save money and increase your efficiency.

To learn more about ways to reduce cloud costs or cloud cost optimization tools, contact the Voleer team!

Read more about reducing cloud costs in our blog - how to reduce and manage cloud costs.

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