An unoptimized cloud environment inevitably leads to unnecessary expenses, especially at an enterprise scale. However, these costs can be avoided with a proper Financial Optimization deployment along with following these five cloud cost optimization best practices.
1. Create a Decommission Process for Unused Assets
When transitioning to the cloud a common pitfall is overly focusing on short-term and present challenges. This often leads to organizations failing to set up a process for decommissioning and requisitioning inactive cloud resources as this challenge only makes itself apparent post-migration. According to a 2021 survey on cloud budgets, one-third of businesses have cloud budget overruns of up to 40%. The majority of this overspend comes from unused cloud assets that were never decommissioned. Creating a workflow to address unused resources is vital as they will continue to rack up unnecessary expenses as long as they are active.
2. Regularly Audit Cloud Costs
Scheduling regular cloud usage audits are imperative for a number of reasons. First, it can help address the issue of identifying unused or underutilized cloud resources. This ensures that cloud assets are decommissioned in a timely manner. Additionally, cloud audits give your organization a historical perspective of your cloud usage. This enables you to identify trends in both usage and cost across the entire organization and also at a more granular functional scale.
3. Consolidate Idle Resources
Some cloud instances may be underutilized but still important to the overall IT environment. While these instances may not be decommissionable, they may not need all of the resources they currently have. For example, if there is a cloud workflow that needs to run every year it is optimal from a cost perspective to maintain this resource but keep it at a lower level of availability.
4. Deploy Data Visualization Tools
In order to maximize the effectiveness of your regular cloud audits powerful data visualization tools should be deployed to visually interpret that data. These tools give your team actionable insights into your cloud environment and also interpret the cost and usage data in an easily understandable way.
5. Use Infrastructure Designed for your Workloads
This is a concept you might be familiar with from your initial cloud migration. However, as your cloud infrastructure continuously evolves it is important to reevaluate workflows to ensure that they are being properly complemented by their cloud infrastructure. A good example would be a multi-cloud deployment that has slowly shifted to being predominantly based out of a single public cloud provider. It may be more cost-effective to transition this workload over to a single cloud infrastructure model.
Need Help Optimizing your Cloud Costs?
If you feel that you are not getting enough out of your cloud, or that you want some assistance in implementing some of these cost optimization best practices, please use the button below to reach out to a member of Strategic Communication’s team of expert cloud engineers.
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