Cloud Assessment and Cost Optimization

Cloud computing costs are a problem for many industries across the globe. Cloud assessment and cost optimization services have increased significantly as companies use cloud services more frequently than expected. ZDNet estimates that global cloud services and infrastructure spending will exceed $370 billion by 2022. However, even if companies try to avoid public service costs, they will spend more on private services than necessary.

as-a-service market (AAS) is expanding to include new features and make it easier to expand infrastructure, but spending more is still risky. Companies that fail to manage costs can increase IT spending and final costs. Companies with difficulty controlling cloud costs should seriously think about a cloud assessment. This will help them identify the costs and determine how to control them. These are the top three reasons cloud analysis can be used to identify instances of under-or over-spending and their worth.

You've probably realized how difficult it is to know exactly where your cloud spending goes and what drives your expenses, regardless of whether you just moved to the cloud or have been there for a while. Cloud experts can provide many benefits, such as scaling up or down according to need. However, your costs could quickly spiral out of control if you don't use the right tools and services.

You may not see the cost savings you expect from operating in the cloud. Instead, your costs could increase. While this can be good (e.g., if you have a rapidly growing business), it can also lead to increased costs. Without proper cost visibility, you will not know why your costs are increasing and how you can optimize them.

This may sound familiar. According to 73% of cloud decision-makers, they are also facing similar problems. Cloud optimization can help.

This guide will explain what cloud optimization is and why it's important. It also includes examples and tools that can help you optimize your cloud spending. You'll be able to understand the benefits of cloud optimization and how you can optimize your costs by the end.

What is cloud management?

Cloud management is monitoring cloud usage in your organization to increase cloud visibility and find cost savings. It also allows you to trim unnecessary features to improve cloud performance. Cloud optimization isn't a one-time deployment. It lasts forever. It is a continuous improvement effort. Developers continuously push code changes to improve certain areas of an app in the cloud. This process is an integral part of Continuous Deployment.

To make improvements, you must first know what is working and what isn't.

The Cloud DevOps strategy and implementation uses it to determine if the application performs as expected for certain KPIs. Cloud management is important for optimizing cloud usage, regardless of whether you use AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or Google Cloud.

Cloud Optimization: Why Is It Important?

Cloud optimization strategies ensure that your cloud migration pays off quickly and over the long term. Companies that wish to reap the cloud benefits of cloud optimization are in dire need. This includes reducing cloud costs and increasing engineers' productivity. It also allows them to shift more operations from an on-premises environment to a cloud environment.

These are just a few of the cloud optimization benefits you should consider.

Cloud optimization increases visibility

Peter Drucker, the famous management consultant, said a quote relevant to cloud optimization today. He stated that it is impossible to improve if you can't measure it. Cloud performance cannot be measured if you don't know how your architecture works behind the scenes. Cloud optimization can help raise awareness about how your company uses the cloud and what tools it uses to do it. This can help avoid major cloud billing surprises. Another example is here.

Your cloud service platform may be viewed as a pay-as-you-use model. It is possible to auto-scale your cloud services on-demand without having to reserve capacity beforehand.

However, just because one of the cloud providers is popular does not automatically make these capabilities available to your account. Pay-as you-Go billing is not as efficient as electricity billing, where you only pay for the power you use. You may instead find yourself constantly over-allocating cloud resources, which can lead to a huge waste of technology.

If you don't have a deep view, estimating the number of instances and reserve capacity needed for virtual operations becomes difficult. Cloud optimization focuses on identifying underutilized features, over-provisioned resources, or mismanaged tools to identify opportunities for improvement.

Cloud optimization reduces unnecessary cloud costs

This is how it looks. Flexera received feedback from over 560 of the 750 cloud decision-makers that they were shifting their focus to increasing cloud cost savings. This was the fifth consecutive year that cloud cost optimization would be a major focus. Why?

This report was prompted by news that 35% of cloud computing budgets are being wasted on average companies. Flexera's 2017 report showed that this percentage was equivalent to $10 billion in wasted public cloud spending. AWS users alone have overpaid $6.4 billion in unnecessary cloud costs.

However, that's not all. Companies also underestimate how much they waste by 15%.

Cloud optimization increases cloud usage

Amazon Web Services is one example. AWS provides over 200 fully-featured cloud services. AWS has also released over 1,000 cloud platform features in some years, including 30 new launches in one keynote event. It can be difficult to keep up with the older and new features. If you don't practice optimization best practices, you might not be able to see many unnecessary tools that you could be paying extra for. Cloud optimization is about ways to reduce the amount of dead weight you don't need. It can also help you find the minimum number of cloud services you need to accomplish your goals. You can also find cheaper, quicker, and more efficient ways to achieve similar goals.

Cloud optimization strategies will improve the productivity of your engineers.

Engineers can concentrate on what they do best: create new code to solve issues. Cloud optimization can be a great way to free your DevOps teams from the constant need to put out fires, which could take up much of their coding time.

A thorough analysis of cloud optimization can reveal the areas that your cloud provider manages, such as the need to update the platform with new capabilities. Depending on your purchased pricing plan, this allows you to see what your cloud provider leaves behind, such as additional cloud security.

This allows you to focus your time and skills on the right tasks at the right times. It helps reduce risks and ensures that your applications work optimally in the cloud.

Cloud computing is essential for cloud cost optimization

Cloud computing technology is still plagued by waste. Many businesses don't realize the cost and volume of their cloud resources. Traditional business practices allow each department to access and manage its cloud resources. This can lead to inefficient resource use, such as "zombie files" that have been abandoned, sitting, wasting resources, and adding no value. A cloud assessment can help you identify wasteful departments and highlight areas that might have duplicate SaaS spending. It will also allow your IT team to improve their budget and internal spending strategy. This is a win-win situation for everyone involved. It allows companies to be more vigilant about cloud resource usage.

A Comprehensive Workload Analysis will ensure that your cloud reflects the needs of today's business.

A third party will perform a cloud assessment and recommend which workloads should be kept in the cloud, which ones you might want to move there, and which ones you have better options for. A cloud assessment includes a workload analysis. Workload analysis ensures that the cloud resources you use today align with your real-world business needs. Keep in mind that workloads are constantly changing. Strategies of yesteryear may not reflect the current productive cloud environment. Hybrid cloud capability can lead to organizations with similar data sets and processes being housed in public and private clouds, effectively increasing cloud costs by more than double.

Cost containment drives the industry to top cloud initiatives.

Cloud capabilities and the need to save money are not new. Cloud initiatives are more expensive than anticipated, so cost containment is a must. A survey of cloud spending revealed that 64% of respondents identified the need to optimize cloud services to save money as their top cloud initiative. If your corner office has not yet asked your department about lowering its IT expenses, it is only a matter of time. An assessment could save you from a major budget cut in the future.

Higher,unchecked charges may result from higher, departmental cloud murphy cases and wasted instance-use cases

Tech Target explains that department cloud purchases can cause more harm than simply creating "zombie" files. It could be ignored, and the process could continue to run in the background, wasting resources. There may be duplicate applications. Sometimes, it can be difficult to identify which applications have the most precise data and value. Also, cloud resources that are not used for mission-critical workloads can be a drain on your resources. If you don't have control over the departments, these issues can be resurrected later. The assessment can identify which departments have a bad habit of over-provisioning resources and where there may be room for improvement. Organizations should establish clear policies and procedures for cloud resource provisioning. This will eliminate the risk from the start.

An optimized data storage strategy permits continuous improvements and cost management.

Optimized data strategies are key to cloud cost optimization. This means that you constantly change the data storage resources to increase the value for your organization. This is even more critical as the data volume and potential applications have increased exponentially over recent years. It is no longer enough to buy and configure storage. Effective cloud cost savings must consider the frequency with which data is accessed, cyber security risks, and whether data value and age require second-tier storage. Optimizing also allows you to review your system processes and automate functions that were not possible a few years back.

Regular Risk Analysts Resist Extra Spending on Routine and Senseful Data Analysis.

Cyber security and the risk of a breach are important concerns when managing your cloud strategy. Cybercriminals exploit every weakness and are responsible for some of the most significant data breaches in history. Additionally, organizations may store sensitive data in the public cloud. This increases the risk. However, it is possible to store too much sensitive data in a private cloud and incur additional costs if the data isn't as sensitive as initially thought. To maximize value and minimize waste, organizations must balance risk and cost. Regular risk assessments can be part of your cloud compliance assessment and help organizations avoid additional spending on maintenance or separation of sensitive data.

Optimizing Your Cloud Investment

Are you unsure where to begin when it comes to cloud optimization and management? Here are five cloud-related cost errors that we frequently see in AWS environments. This can be used as a checklist to identify low-hanging fruits and optimize costs. This is an excellent first step in your cloud optimization and management journey.

PerfectionGeeks Technologies is a cloud-based intelligence platform that connects technical and business decisions. Request a demo to see how PerfectionGeeks Technologies can optimize your cloud spending. Contact us now to find out more.