Six Ways to Reduce Your Cloud Bill
The vitality of any innovation is to make lives easier. Cloud computing has taken innovation to a whole new level giving organizations opportunities to benefit from the flexibility and scalability of the cloud. Learning to leverage cloud services’ efficiency could provide companies with immediate economic gains. According to Foundry’s 2022 Cloud Computing research, on average, the companies are likely to spend $78 million on cloud computing over the next 12 months. The Flexera 2022 State of the Cloud Report identified cloud cost savings as one of the three main initiatives for successfully implementing their cloud strategy. Unfortunately, many companies are unprepared or unaware of the possibilities to profit from cloud savings and are likely to overspend on their cloud budget.
In their 2020 study on cloud optimization, Gartner observes that equating cloud costs to business KPIs enables organizations to manage spending in terms of Return on investment (ROI). It also enables businesses to assess the financial impact of cost growth and optimization. And the process to achieve control over your cloud costs mustn’t always be difficult. It is just that you need to work your way around cloud costs for a better experience. In this blog, let us look at some of how you can reduce your cloud spending most efficiently. Cloud cost optimization is the process of reducing cloud costs by ensuring that you pay only for what you use. Let’s discuss the first one which is streamlining unused resources.
Identifying Unused Resources
While using the cloud environment, there can be unexpected instances such as a teammate who forgets to sign off after spinning up a temporary server for a one-time use, or an administrator who forgets to remove the storage linked to a terminated instance even after completing the task. These may be small errors, but they can potentially increase cloud costs and the company is forced to remit the bill for such unused resources. As an initial step to cloud optimization, organizations can streamline cloud costs by identifying unused resources and removing them. Attention to such small details can easily bring down unexpected spikes and overpaying.
Managing Idle Resources
Streamlining idle resources and merging them is important for better productivity and reduced costs. Merging unused resources is a crucial step that could save you some good bucks. It is pertinent to identify such idle resources and address them before funding them. An idle computing instance utilizes only a meager part of the CPU, but the company is billed for 100 percent of the CPU utilization. An alternative is to identify such instances and integrate them into fewer computing instances. Usually, companies preserve resources for attending a busy season or an unexpected surge in traffic. This can be easily solved as the cloud service providers offer features such as autoscaling, load balancing, and on-demand capabilities that would give you the luxury to scale up the computing power as per your requirement so that you don’t need to save idle resources for a rainy day.
Leveraging Heatmaps
Here we are talking about how to optimize your cloud cost and one of the most effective and functional mechanisms to do it is the use of Heat maps.
Heat maps are visual tools that signify ebbs and flow in your organization’s computing demand. Heat maps can be an excellent tool to set times for cloud computing resources. If your computing need is little during weekends, there is no point in wasting the cloud cost for no service. You will be able to shut down your servers during those times. Integrating automation into this process can ease the process and help you optimize cloud costs.
Rightsizing Resources
You can do 10 things right and leave out one thing wrong and that’s going to cost you. We are going to talk about one such step that could bring a difference to your activities, rightsizing your cloud resources. This step not only reduces your cloud costs but also optimizes your cloud by improving the performance of the resources that you are paying for. Analyzing your computing services to find the right size for your operational necessity. Make use of the apt tools for rightsizing your resources alongside database, memory, storage capacity, and graphics, among others.
Invest in Reserved Instances
Enterprises can invest in Reserved instances to reduce cloud costs, particularly for larger organizations that plan to use cloud services for an extended period. These are lucrative discounts offered to organizations that are willing to commit to longer periods and upfront payments, similar to the reduced rates for longer subscriptions. By taking advantage of reserved instances, you could save up to 75% on cloud costs. Investing in Reserved Instances has piqued your interest already, isn’t it?
But, of course, there is a catch. To get the most out of the chosen RI, you must be well-informed about your future cloud plans based on past cloud usage patterns. And that’s where you need the help of a cloud service provider to navigate you through cloud computing in the most seamless way.
Usage Review and optimize using Analytics and other tools
The use of cloud management tools to monitor and optimize cloud usage and costs is an intelligent option to adopt when on a path of cloud optimization. These tools can provide visibility into an organization’s cloud usage, allowing them to identify areas where costs can be reduced. They can also provide recommendations for optimizing workloads, such as by shutting down idle resources or moving them to a different pricing model. Another trend in the industry is the use of predictive analytics to forecast cloud costs and make more informed decisions about resource allocation. These tools can help organizations plan their cloud usage in advance, allowing them to optimize their spending and avoid unexpected costs. For example, AWS offers several services, such as AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Trusted Advisor, that can help businesses optimize their cloud costs.
Cloud providers offer a variety of pricing models, including pay-as-you-go, reserved instances, and spot instances. Choosing the right pricing model for your workload can help you save money. Overall, the trends in cloud cost optimization are focused on helping businesses save money on their cloud computing costs while still benefiting from the flexibility and scalability of the cloud. By using a combination of on-demand and reserved instances, implementing autoscaling, and utilizing tools and services to monitor and manage their spending, businesses can optimize their cloud costs and improve their efficiency.
learn more about ways to reduce cloud costs or cloud cost optimization tools, contact the Tringapps team to set up a hassle-free cloud cost optimization process for your enterprise.
