A large percentage of companies today are spending too much on compute resources and storage. For example, capital charges with excess capability in on-prem data centers, to help meet increasing demand.
TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) is the cost of a service or product, in addition to any running charges. The total cost covers the initial price, usage, maintenance, and disposal of both physical and cloud resources. TCO may be used to balance costs against reward-focused services, applications, or hardware. By analyzing the TCO, companies can easily examine all of the costs involved to help make important decisions.
When you migrate workloads and applications to the cloud, you have to provide support services, such as access management, storage, networking, and monitoring. These services may cost more than planned, so you will need to factor in these expenses for a true total cost.
In many cases, companies must calculate the total cost of ownership prior to migrating to the public cloud.
Consider the following 7 steps to reducing TCO and optimizing cloud bills:
1. Support workload portability
TCO assessment requires identifying the market needs that are gaining momentum. It is difficult to predict which compute resources will be needed in the future. It is a good idea however, to select those that are flexible, should optimization be required at a later date. This ensures that you are not locked into a specific platform or vendor, and will also improve your longer-term TCO position.
2. Save your existing investments
When considering new technologies and procedures for any IT infrastructure, it’s wise to keep existing investments at reasonable levels. The goal is to focus on network solutions that produce maximum agility. Your operations and network systems should be well integrated. Determine which of your existing investments will help minimize future costs, and which will hinder your ability to grow and transform your business. It will help you to reduce your spending. Hold on only to investments that have a positive impact on growth and that keeps costs down.
3. Use a cloud governance tool
A good cloud billing tool supports any cloud use-case. The tool should be selected not only to keep costs down but also to prevent waste. It should help to select the right cloud use-case, based on both size and cost, and allow you to predict the costs of running your workloads.
4. Optimize cloud storage
Storage in the cloud is a great way to reduce on-premises hardware usage, as storage needs continue to evolve. Optimization helps to improve and maintain control over the ever-increasing volume of data coming from different sources. It is always important to create multiple data lines and store the incoming data in their respective data line. It is also necessary to distribute the workloads effectively between spinning disks and flash to help improve data storage and control.
5. Automation
The more you leave cloud incapabilities unattended, the more the costs will increase. However, by utilizing the automation features of cost-optimization tools, you can set up immediate replies to the misconfigurations and mitigate them as soon as they occur. In addition, these features help you to keep expenses at bay and reduce costs without tedious, manual operations while enabling your management team to focus on cloud management.
6. Migrate to a cloud and reduce on-prem utilization
By moving workloads from on-premises to the cloud, enterprises outsource a number of their most time-consuming IT management and maintenance activities. This frees up IT teams to concentrate on revenue-generating activities, such as; developing features, fixes, and new innovations in order to enhance customer experience and gain an edge over competitors. Migrating to the cloud improves agility, lowers TCO, and accelerates innovation using cloud-native development and automation technology.
7. Use cloud backup and disaster recovery to reduce failover site TCO
A lot of cloud backup solutions give businesses a way to economically off-site critical data into a cloud provider’s facility. Companies also need a way to rapidly recover failed business applications, both at their primary site and in the cloud. In addition, they need solutions that aren’t complex or that carry a high TCO. Disaster Recovery services may help you get your site back up and to enjoy such benefits as; storage optimization, data protection, better manageability and reduced disaster recovery costs by utilizing a cost-efficient failover platform.
Utilizing the steps laid out above will enable you, and your organization, to take a progressive approach to your custom software development practices and will help to significantly reduce your cloud costs and optimize cloud bills.
Read our recent article and learn more about Migration from Private to Public Clouds: Switching from CapEx to OpEx
