A girl working on a laptop with cloud services in the background

Cloud cost optimization checklist

Cloud services have come up as an ideal solution considering the current unpredictable circumstances. While switching and migrating the workload of your business to the cloud, the associated expenses are the primary element that is brought up for discussion. Cost is the main component that leads organizations to incline towards the cloud in the first place. Although investing in cloud services is the resourceful pathway to maintaining a flexible workplace but the costs engaged in this can hastily move out of hand if not monitored periodically.

A girl is sitting at a table and calculating her current expenses.

Adopting cloud computing comes with numerous demanding situations for organizations, however, managing the cloud cost may be one of the most demanding ones. It was revealed in a survey of over 800 organizations, that 32% of their cloud is being spent as waste and 80% of them are finding it challenging to manage the cloud. Most organizations make the decision of moving to the cloud by putting the cost as their prime motivation making the mistake of taking the fastest route by simply lifting and shifting their applications to cloud infrastructure from their in-house data centre. Many enterprises are let down when they find the cost going up instead going down.

Today, the cloud offers unlimited scalability and flexibility, but there is still a vital requirement of budgeting its cost. Although the cloud services charge the cost of the resources you use the goal of being a frontrunner comes with a planned structure of holding the workload requirements while bringing cost-effectiveness. But nothing to worry about, there are numerous assured techniques to optimize your cloud cost.

  • Inspect all the current expense areas

1.Random approaches towards constraining the expenses of the business within expectations when the expectations are not set is like squeezing water from a stone. Forecasting the consumption and constructing a budget expectation is imperative for organizations to avoid unnecessary expenses. Before deploying the applications, projects and workloads in the cloud, organizations need to develop this forecasting capability and run all the related processes beforehand. They need to define the objectives to be fulfilled and gain a comprehensive understanding to achieve certain goals for their business success. They also need to determine the key precedents that would help them figure out their business model efficiently and structure the initial plan for the establishment of the significant suitable cloud service provider.

  • Exercise heat maps for specified results

2.Any existing business in the market that desires to achieve great success in terms of profit as well as goodwill need to ensure that they are evaluating all the aspects affecting their business, be it for good or bad. For staying ahead or prepared for any and all situation, comes the visual tool ‘heat maps.’ Heat maps are a critical and more consistent approach for the optimization of the cloud cost. It gives a technique to create reusable, repeatable solution structure and guidance. It basically works as a manual to make sure that all the necessary requirements of each aspect and domain have been taken into consideration. It offers the solution assessment and selection of the most fitting cloud services for all your business and technical requirements.

A man sitting at a table with a diary and a calculator is examining potential cloud providers on the market
  • Examine the market for potential cloud providers

Choosing the right provider is the most important aspect that plays a crucial role in migrating your data to the cloud. Before you could efficiently pick an appropriate service provider, you need to apprehend your precise business needs. With the most prominent players in the market like AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure, your choice of services is not limited. Although some small cloud vendors may also be a better fit when it comes to price or performance ratio as they rely upon fewer elements and have more defined target audiences. Pricing among cloud service providers can extensively range based on your workload. While analysing the market and cloud provider’s services, align them well with your data requirements.

  • Estimate and prioritize cost-saving opportunities

Ideally, your research must combine thorough discussions with specialists to estimate your cost-saving opportunities. Some cloud service providers propose dynamic tools that provide performance and security suggestions. Planning the trailhead of your cloud infrastructure might forsake you with an overwhelming amount of information. To identify the places in your infrastructure where you could reduce costs, it’s miles essential to stabilise the capability of financial savings in opposition to the complexity and sources required to recognize the financial savings. It is crucial to evaluate a structured technique that computes, stores, and networks well to estimate the cost-saving opportunities for which you require a rigorous in-depth study for the relevant cloud service providers to your business.

  • Monitor the adopted cloud services

When an organisation decides to opt for cloud computing as a priority, the responsibility doesn’t just end there. There needs to be a proper optimization and monitoring of the cloud adopted in order to stay in the budget and to determine its effectiveness at any given time. When the scaling puts forward to meet the demand, it triggers the increased demand. To track down all the activities on the cloud and its associated cost, strong monitoring solutions are implemented. With cloud, customers are supposed to pay for the services once they are ordered, whether they use them or not. If not monitored religiously, the cost may move out of hand and become tricky to handle.

By making use of the checklist above, you may begin to manage your spending, set up practical cloud operations budgets. Thought-Sol and its IT and cloud operations teams undertake optimization of cloud implementations efficiently. The efforts required for it is much more complicated than anticipated but our proficient experts with proven results are conquering in the cloud field enabling organizations with effortless services cost-effectively.

Vineet Kumar

With the experience of 26 years in the IT industry, I founded Thought-Sol Infotech in 2014 with the main aim to bring meaningful change and empower businesses with advanced-reliable IT infrastructure. We provide huge diversification of infrastructure services for any and all technology-related business needs.