Cloud computing has revolutionised the way businesses operate. It offers scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency. But cloud services also come with a downside: cloud waste.
Cloud waste is the unnecessary spending of resources and money on cloud services. These services are often not fully utilised or optimised. About 32% of cloud spending is wasted. This can lead to budget concerns as spending skyrockets.
But that figure also holds opportunity. It means that you can reduce nearly a third of cloud spending by optimising how you use cloud tools.
So, how can you reduce cloud waste at your business and save money? Here are some smart tactics to consider.
Conducting a Comprehensive Cloud Audit
Before implementing any cost-saving measures, it’s imperative to conduct a thorough audit of your cloud infrastructure. This entails gaining insights into your current cloud usage patterns to identify:
- Underutilised resources
- Instances with excessive provisioning
- Redundant or unnecessary services
Utilise cloud management tools to generate detailed reports encompassing usage trends, cost breakdowns, and performance metrics. This initial assessment forms the groundwork for implementing effective strategies to minimise resource wastage.
Implementing Right-Sizing Strategies
Right-sizing involves aligning your cloud resources precisely with the demands of your workloads. Overprovisioning can lead to unnecessary expenses and resource allocation. Analyse your workload requirements meticulously and resize instances accordingly, leveraging tools provided by your cloud service provider. This ensures that you only pay for the resources essential to your operations.
Leveraging Reserved Instances and Savings Plans
Cloud providers offer cost-saving options such as Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans, which allow businesses to commit to specific usage levels in exchange for discounted rates. Conduct a thorough analysis of your workload and usage patterns to determine the most cost-effective reserved capacity or savings plan that aligns with your long-term business objectives.
Deploying Automated Scaling Policies
Dynamic workloads necessitate dynamic resource allocation. Implement automated scaling policies to ensure that your infrastructure scales up or down in response to demand fluctuations. This enhances performance while mitigating the risks of overprovisioning during periods of low activity. Cloud services offer predefined policies for scaling, such as AWS Auto Scaling and Azure Autoscale, streamlining resource utilisation without manual intervention.
Optimising Storage Management
Storage costs can escalate rapidly, particularly when data is not regularly reviewed and archived. Estimate your storage needs accurately and establish lifecycle policies to downsize lesser-used data automatically. Regularly review and delete unnecessary data to free up storage space, adopting a proactive approach to storage management to minimise costs associated with data storage.
Scheduling Cloud Resources
Schedule your cloud resources to operate only when required, optimising costs by shutting down non-essential environments during off-peak hours. Leverage available automation tools to streamline the scheduling process based on predefined rules and policies.
Eliminating Unused or Orphaned Resources
Regularly audit your cloud environment to identify and remove unused or orphaned resources, including snapshots, backups, volumes, load balancers, IP addresses, and unused accounts. Utilise tools provided by cloud providers to facilitate the detection and removal of these redundant assets, thereby reducing unnecessary costs.
Consolidating Cloud Services
Centralise cloud resources and eliminate duplicate services utilised across different departments within the organisation. Standardising on a single cloud tool for a specific function not only saves costs but also enhances collaboration, reporting, and data integration capabilities.
Embracing Serverless Architecture
Consider migrating suitable workloads to a serverless architecture, which enables businesses to run applications without managing underlying infrastructure. By paying only for the compute resources utilised, serverless computing reduces operational complexity and costs, optimising resource utilisation and minimising cloud waste.
Schedule a Cloud Optimisation Assessment
To address expanding cloud costs and identify opportunities for waste reduction, our team of cloud experts stands ready to assist you.
Contact us today to schedule your comprehensive cloud optimisation assessment.
