When it comes to migrating your workload to the cloud, the related costs are the first thing that is put up for discussion. Cost is the driving factor that leads to organizations opting for a cloud in the first place. Considering the current unpredictable circumstances, cloud services present themselves as the ideal solution. Although investing in cloud services is the best way to maintain a remote workforce, the costs involved can quickly spiral out of control if not kept in check. In this article, we’ll discuss some ways that can help you keep your cloud costs in control.
Budget Carefully
The first and foremost step in cloud migration is analyzing your current infrastructure expenditure and whether a cloud will be able to reduce it or not. In almost all cases, cloud services allow companies the benefits of greater flexibility at low costs. However, if left unchecked, these services can lead to unplanned cloud costs. The first stage calls for the organization to make a budget for cloud services and work accordingly.
Increase Visibility
Granular visibility into the cloud infrastructure allows users to monitor and ensure optimal performance, identify security indicators, and correct degradation. Cloud visibility ensures that users can forego unused or underutilized resources while monitoring threat identifications. Multiple tools are available to identify malicious traffic by source and monitor traffic at every link of the network. Visibility also allows users to ensure every single resource of the company is optimized, thus eradicating any wastage, and saving on costs.
Find and Remove Underutilized Resources
Before diving head-first onto the cloud bandwagon, it is imperative to ensure you do not opt for excess resources. Although in multiple cases, estimating this usage beforehand is very difficult, which leads to underutilized resources. These resources often keep running in the cloud environment, even without serving any purpose and lead to unnecessary costs. Identification and removal of such resources can have a huge impact on a company’s cloud bills.
Implement Monitoring and Alarms
It becomes essential to implement proper monitoring in order to tackle resource wastage was described in the paragraph above. Organizations need to introduce appropriate monitoring tools to ensure proper utilization of their resources. Another aspect is implementing alarms according to a set of predefined rules without the need for any human input. These help organizations remain within the budget with automated triggers if a predefined threshold is crossed.
Integrate Services
Due to the changing nature of workloads in many organizations, hybrid cloud infrastructure has become a go-to for many enterprises. In this regard, allowing the integration of services between multiple platforms becomes essential for businesses to ensure consistency and efficiency. A stand-alone service leads to less cost-efficiency than a package of services available across all platforms.
Reserve Instances
When migrating from on-premise servers to the cloud, organizations need to opt for optimal level of services to run their workloads. These services can then be scaled according to the organizations’ needs in the future. This is where reserved instances come into play, as once an organization determines its needs, it can opt for reserves instances, which can bring huge savings on their cloud costs. In some cases, reserved instances can reduce cloud costs by 50%.
Increase Cloud Automation
Another cloud aspect that often goes unnoticed is cloud automation. A majority of mundane cloud tasks can be automated, but organizations still allocate specialized technicians to handle them. This lack of automation leads to higher costs with no rise in returns. Automation allows organizations to free up resources and focus on asset creation instead of daily maintenance.
Optimize Backups
Along the lines of automation, backups are another ignored section while companies migrate to the cloud. Generally, backups are created regularly, but older backups are not deleted, leading to excess storage usage. Optimizing backups allows organizations to retain a few backups while saving on resources while giving them the option to choose which resources and information they want to keep.
Overview
Exceeding cloud budgets is a common problem that organizations can easily avoid. Maintaining a healthy cloud and getting the desired Return On Investment (ROI) from your cloud can be tough but not unachievable. The optimal way of getting the desired ROI from your cloud is consulting third-party experts to make concrete and precise projections regarding your cloud.
It is also crucial for the organization to remain vigilant, especially if it involves multiple access points with users capable of making billable changes. An intelligent CMP like Centilytics helps you save a lot of resources, time, and money with one-click solutions focused on optimization, visibility, and much more. Click here to book a demo of our CMP today.