9 Best Practices to Optimize Your Cloud Costs
What is Cloud Cost Optimization?
Cloud cost optimization is the process of continuously evaluating and configuring all cloud resources that power your company's applications, infrastructures, and workloads. It is a theme that should be at the forefront of every enterprise's IT business strategy but is frequently overlooked. This article discusses the most critical aspects of cost optimization. The recommendations will assist you in lowering infrastructure and maintenance costs, meeting performance and scalability requirements, and enabling timely data-driven decisions.
We emphasize the importance of operational governance and budget predictability to ensure that you get the most out of your overall technology investments. What will become clear is that cloud cost optimization is about more than just avoiding the costly mistakes that businesses make in the cloud.
Rather, it is about putting in place a solid cloud strategy as well as a strong asset management strategy. This is critical for cloud cost optimization.
Whether you choose Microsoft, AWS, Google, IBM, Oracle, or a combination of these, you will need to think about how you will handle administration, cost optimization, and procurement across the platforms.
Here are 9 ways your business can save Cloud costs:
1. Evaluate Your Resources
There is now clear evidence that companies buy too much computing power in the cloud. This is called "over-provisioning." They spend too much on CPU, RAM, and network usage (to name but three problems). As experts in the cloud, Sitech can make sure that your move to the cloud or switch to multi-cloud starts off right.
2. Application Rightsizing
Rightsizing is important when it comes to RI, which stands for "Reserved Instances." RI is for applications that are used all the time (24/7), so they need reserved capacity. By signing contracts for one or three years, costs can be cut in other ways. But a common problem is that companies buy too much RI capacity at the wrong price and don't keep an eye on their services. Sitech can use metrics to find instances that aren't being used enough. These instances can then be downgraded, changed, or turned off. It's all about seeing and understanding. By figuring out the best RI capacity, Sitech often finds optimizations of 20–35%.
3. Establish Governance
Do you have any non-core servers that can be shut down with proper resource management? On weekends, 90% of businesses are closed. What can you turn off? What can be reduced and managed better? To capitalize on these opportunities, you must have good governance and frameworks in place. We have the necessary equipment.
- Use pricing models wisely to reduce the unit cost of cloud consumption. It's astonishing that getting the pricing model on the resources you use right can result in cost savings of up to 80% on certain cloud resources.
- Services that are pay-as-you-go: These are best suited for applications with short-term, fluctuating, or unpredictable workloads. Are your business divisions and employees utilizing them for the intended purposes? Have you fully comprehended the pricing models? Are they being adequately monitored?
- Reserved instances/commitment-based Reservations
Do you know how these work and how they are priced? There are plenty of companies that do not. Can you offer additional discounts if you commit to three-year contracts? We can tailor your costs to your specific requirements.
4. Ensure You Have the Ideal Storage Services From the Start
Consultants frequently advise clients to buy too much cloud storage. Are your services matched to the demands of your business, or are you overprovisioned? Furthermore, there are four different types of storage that are priced based on the level of performance required by your business. Do you have the appropriate product at the appropriate price? We are confident that we can assist you in lowering the unit price of your resources because we have consistently achieved cloud storage savings of 20-35% for our customers.
5. Assign Roles and Responsibilities for Business Development and New Ventures
Are there sufficient management and monitoring systems in place for the newly commissioned cloud servers that business development teams use for various projects and campaigns? When the project is finished, who is going to be in charge of taking down the servers and decommissioning them? The potential for optimization and efficiency gains in this situation are not insignificant, and it is not difficult to realize those gains.
6. Consolidate and Balance Enterprise Subscriptions
Cloud subscriptions are frequently assigned to users who do not require them by IT departments. Another issue is that some departments or divisions may have too many subscriptions while others do not. Balance and efficiency are simple to achieve.
7. Assess and Confirm Hybrid Benefit Use Rights
When a client can use the licenses they purchased for their on-premises servers/applications in the cloud, they gain hybrid benefits. Not all licenses are eligible for hybrid benefits, and the process can be difficult to understand and execute correctly. It all comes down to the level of operational insight you can gain into your software assets. Is your company reaping the full benefits of the cloud and, as a result, making the most of the investments you've already made in the cloud environment? We can thoroughly audit your IT estate to identify all investments for which you have dual-rights usage. The cost savings can be substantial.
8. Validate Agreements and Pricing Promotions
Unfortunately, many resellers are inefficient when it comes to passing cost savings on to clients. They are also lax in emphasizing various promotions that can lower the prices paid for cloud and software assets. Sitech makes a commitment to all of its clients to provide transparent purchase prices so that customers can validate the prices they pay for cloud consumption.
Learn more about our Cloud Managed Services for Startups.
9. Consolidate Multiple Cloud Services
Because of the dynamics of cloud consumption, licenses and subscriptions are frequently purchased under multiple small agreements from the same vendor - often by different business units. Sitech’s business is based on its expertise in license management. We can assist you in combining multiple licensing agreements into a single larger agreement.
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