Companies of all sizes and industry types are increasingly turning to cloud transformation as a tactic to eliminate legacy infrastructure, access cutting edge services and, to save IT budgets.
According to Gartner’s forecast1, the global public cloud service market is projected to grow 17% in 2020 to total $266.4 billion, up from $227.8 billion in 2019. Also Gartner predicts growth in 2021 to total $308.5 billion, in 2022 to total $354.6 billion.
Due to the fact that a growing number of companies are building complex cloud infrastructures, effective cloud management is becoming particularly relevant. The majority of enterprises already have a central cloud team in place whose key objectives are to optimize cloud costs.
Cloud computing key trends highlighting the critical importance of efficient cloud management
- A companies’ cloud computing spending makes up a significant part of its IT budget, making cloud cost optimization a priority
- A complex multi-cloud strategy is becoming more prevalent among companies of all sizes
- Businesses consider it important to both maintain a balance between public and private clouds, and to build a hybrid cloud infrastructure
- Enterprises begin by using five or more cloud platforms, which makes the data management process rather complicated
How to reduce your company’s cloud costs
Based on our research and on our vast cloud experience, companies today have an opportunity to save up to 35% on their monthly cloud bill.
We have prepared 7 tips on how to do just that:
1. Get rid of unused or idle resources
One of the easiest ways to save your company’s cloud budget is to first find all of your unused or idle resources. By using detailed analysis and monitoring tools, you can estimate the service consumption in order to identify underutilized cloud resources. Your team can then start to use these more efficiently or to de-implement them.
Additionally, no company is safe from a situation in which an IT Engineer or Developer mistakenly spins up a temporary instance, and then forgets to switch it off when the job is done. A cloud cost optimization strategy enables companies to avoid such cases, thereby preventing potential overspending.
2. Identify unnecessary data storage
Another simple, yet effective way to reduce cloud costs is to find unnecessary data, located on your cloud resources. Some companies store all incoming data, and don’t eliminate the unused data in time. By finding unnecessary volumes and snapshots, you achieve peak performance from the resources that you are paying for.
3. Eliminate cloud resources downtime
Сloud resources could function 24 hours a day, even if they are not actually used. Scenarios that activate cloud services, on a 12-hour business day, for example, can significantly reduce cloud costs.
4. Get constant, detailed monitoring of your cloud resource usage
Your team could provide a provisioning process via a cloud console, API, scripts or a third party cloud management platform. Smart reporting and automated alerts will help you to prevent budget overruns.
5. Automate the optimization process
Despite the fact that companies are beginning to pay more attention to cloud cost optimization, most of them are still doing it manually. Therefore, we suggest that you automate the necessary processes. This will allow you to solve optimization problems faster and more efficiently, positively affecting the bill that you receive from your cloud provider.
6. Conduct a comparison analysis and select a cost-effective cloud platform
Identify your high peak demands for storage, workloads and processing.
The solution is to restructure your existing cloud infrastructure, to optimize cloud spending by migrating to a cost-effective cloud platform, keeping in mind all of the technical requirements.
7. Build the right forecasts and determine the cloud budget accordingly
Future cost prediction is a well established practice, but everything changes when it comes to the cloud. With thousands of resources, developing cloud infrastructure is complex, yet ever changing. Sophisticated, automated cloud budget forecasts help companies avoid unpredictable costs.
Conclusion
By following the recommendations mentioned above, your company has an opportunity to significantly reduce cloud billing.
Needless to say, cloud cost optimization is a gradual, yet continuous process that takes time to implement. It is however, inseparably intertwined with the steady monitoring of cloud infrastructure effectiveness. Presently, cloud cost optimization has acquired special significance in the cloud computing arena, as it seeks to keep your company’s cloud bill under control, as well as, to prevent unpredictable overruns.
Learn more how to cut cloud costs, orchestrate workloads and enhance team collaboration with our new multicloud platform – Hystax OptScale.
1 https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2019-11-13-gartner-forecasts-worldwide-public-cloud-revenue-to-grow-17-percent-in-2020
