4 Tips for Better Cloud Cost Optimization

In a recent survey, 47% of organizations mentioned potential cost savings as the primary reason for adopting the cloud. With infrastructure-related expenses accounting for over 30% of most companies’ budgets, it’s easy to see why firms are migrating their infrastructural needs to the cloud in droves. Along with the scalability and flexibility advantages, it comes with, a cloud-native architecture mostly allows companies to eliminate current and future on-site infrastructure expenses. 

While they might experience significant cost savings initially, many companies quickly struggle with spiraling cloud spend as they launch more resources. In fact, 61% of surveyed companies consider cost optimizing existing cloud setups as their topmost priority. What might be the cause of this phenomenon?

The simple answer is that many companies are simply not implementing essential best practices that will help them reduce cloud waste and give them back control over their cloud. 

1. Establish A Cloud Center Of Excellence (CCoE)

Many organizations are quick to provision new cloud resources to meet their migration deadlines without paying attention to critical principles that will help them maintain and optimize their cloud workloads over time.

Building a CCOE is the first step to setting up successful cloud financial management. An organization’s CCOE team consisting of key stakeholders is saddled with enforcing operational accountability across all departments. They must also ensure the proper implementation of company-wide cloud policies.

To be successful in their mission of accelerating their cloud adoption goals, the CCOE team must be equipped with tools that provide detailed insights on various departments’ specific workloads.

2. Gain Visibility

Visibility is one of the first things organizations lose as they ramp up their cloud infrastructure without a solid cloud strategy. Provisioning workloads without complete visibility into your cloud environment is akin to throwing darts in the dark.

Gaining visibility involves being aware of changes to your resources and configuration setups. You should be able to track changes down to a user, resource, event, or workload. It also involves being notified of events as they occur. All these and more will help you make more precise cost management strategies that will keep your cloud secure and cost-effective now and in the future.  

Using a cloud management platform like nOps that provides you a 360 degree, granular, Single pane of glass view of your cloud resources will help you stop making wild guesses.

3. Reduce Cloud Waste

About 30% of organizations' cloud budgets are estimated to be wasted. Setting up a CCOE and gaining complete visibility will empower organizations to combat waste by taking decisive cost optimization strategies like:

• Rightsizing underutilized and overprovisioned resources.
• Eliminating unused resources.
• Taking advantage of Spot and Reserved Instances’ pricing where necessary.

It’s also important to use advanced billing anomalies detection systems like nOps that can warn you of potential money-draining activities and help you eliminate bill shocks. 

4. Continuous Automated Monitoring 

Setting up an organizational strategy that implements the tips mentioned earlier is a good step in the right direction. However, not implementing a continuous monitoring system can render your plan useless.

To accrue maximum business value, your goal should be to run cost-optimized public cloud workloads and stay that way into the foreseeable future.

An excellent way to accomplish this lofty goal is by leveraging an automated platform that continuously scans your infrastructure for cost-saving opportunities to optimize your resource utilization and improve your infrastructure health. Such a platform should also continuously identify gaps in your infrastructure’s compliance with established Well-Architected best practices and provide appropriate recommendations.  

Conclusion

Implementing these tips will help you stop racking up unnecessary cloud costs and get more out of your provisioned cloud resources. However, performing all these steps can be incredibly difficult without a tool that can provide you with detailed, actionable insights into your workloads.

nOps is the first CloudOps platform designed to sync revenue growth across your teams. Our comprehensive suite of tools is purpose-built to support your cloud compliance with cost optimization best practices. We also provide you with in-depth cost insights that will help you enforce operational accountability across your organization.