A Cloud Cost Control Strategy that Works

Cloud cost control is becoming increasingly important because of the ever-increasing cloud budgets. Many enterprises initially moved to the cloud to cut down on datacenter costs. And now they’re wondering whether they made the right decisions given the ballooning cloud costs.

Today, we’re going to go over six cloud management tips to help you bring cloud costs under control.

PLAN AND ANALYZE

You shouldn’t look at the cloud by itself as an automatic way to save money. Essentially, you should plan your move to the cloud and do a detailed cost-benefit analysis. You see, savings won’t materialize until you have clear objectives to plan around.

Start by mapping out existing resources and create estimates of what each service requires for a year.

STRIVE TO OPTIMIZE

When migrating your workloads to the public cloud, it’s best to anticipate your provisioning needs. Use them to right-size your cloud configuration.

Ditch the common legacy datacenter practice where organizations over-provision when deploying new resources. Instead, rely on the elastic nature of the cloud to respond to demand fluctuations quickly and dynamically.

Also, avoid giving teams free rein to provision new instances. It often results in instances running longer than required. This can spiral your cloud costs.

CULTIVATE A COST-CONSCIOUS CLOUD CULTURE

Adopting the cloud is not only a technology change, but it’s also a cultural shift. From the get-go, you must encourage a cost-conscious cloud culture where your team focuses on saving money and boosting performance. After all, costs optimization should be everyone’s responsibility.

You need cost transparency and clean financial data to provide accurate visibility into cloud spend and cost-saving opportunities.

Last, you must measure your cloud spend against business KPIs. Doing this allows you to add some context to the spend and change the cloud conversation from costs to ROI.

GO CLOUD-NATIVE

Taking a cloud-native approach toward building and running application exploits the advantages of the cloud delivery model. It is the best way to move your workloads to the cloud.

Some enterprises go for a “lift and shift” approach. This means moving workloads from on-premises to the cloud with no modification. This approach promises a faster rollout. However, it comes with some costly risks that include performance and latency issues. It can even lead to total migration failure.

In summary, it’s not a good idea to run workloads that you haven’t optimized for your cloud environment.

GET ORGANIZED

You can minimize cloud costs by building and maintaining a proper cloud governance regimen. Implement naming and tagging standards across all your subscriptions. Follow this up by enforcing the set standards with automatically validated policies.

You’ll need to use built-in auditing, reporting, and budget constraint capabilities to enforce compliance. Have teams properly designate owners and project relationships. This allows you to trace back costs to specific instances and teams.

EXPLOIT AVAILABLE SAVINGS OPPORTUNITIES

Make the most of savings opportunities in the public cloud. To do this, you could embrace the pay-as-you-go model. Take advantage of the different pricing options from various public cloud providers.

Pay particular attention to resources that need to be continuously up and running. You should run these where they’re the cheapest. Also, take advantage of prepackaged and managed resources. Managed resources cost more initially, but they save you lots of time. You can use this time on other tasks and goals.

For instance, you can opt for database platforms that come as fully managed services. In such a setup, you can perform upgrades, redundancy, and backups seamlessly without intervention. Remove the task of managing the database layer from your team members. This will allow them to relocate it to areas that increase business ROI.

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