Smart Tactics to Reduce Cloud Waste in your Business

Smart Tactics To Reduce Cloud Waste at Your Business

The advent of cloud computing has revolutionised the wat in which businesses can operate. Cloud computing offers unprecedented opportunities for flexibility, scalability and cost efficiency. A savvy operator like yourself will realise that nothing comes without its downsides, and cloud computing is no different. The biggest downside to cloud services is Cloud Waste.

But what is cloud waste and how do we avoid it? Cloud waste is the unnecessary spending of manpower and finance on cloud services. Often these services are not fully utilised or haven’t been optimised to their fullest. A recent study from Cloudzero suggests that around 32% of cloud spending is wasted. If you’re anything like ourselves, that figure would make your eyes water. All that unnecessary spend can skyrocket and very quickly become a major budget headache.

Don’t be too perturbed however, hidden in that bad news is a positive. It’s entirely possible you may be able to reduce cloud waste by nearly a third by optimising how your business uses cloud tools.

So, how do you reduce cloud waste at your business? How do you save your money? What should you spend that money on?

Well for the first two, read this blog and we’ll give you a smart guide to tactics to reduce cloud waste, as for the third question, maybe buy us a pint or something next time we see you.

Conduct a Comprehensive Cloud Waste Audit

Before you begin implementing any cost-cutting strategies, conduct an audit. How can you cut costs and optimise if you don’t know what you currently use and what you’re spending money on? It’s essential to have a full understanding of your current cloud utilisation. The only way to understand this is to conduct a full and comprehensive cloud audit allows you to identify:

• Underutilised Resources
• Overprovisioned instances
• Unnecessary Services

But how do I conduct one? Most cloud management tools will allow you to generate a variety of reports. Use these reports to look at usage patterns, costs and important performance metrics. This initial assessment should serve as a foundation for building and implementing effective waste reduction strategies.

Put in Place Right-Sizing Strategies

Right-sizing, what is it and why do we keep introducing what seem to be made up terms? Right-sizing involves matching your cloud resources to the actual demands your workforce have. In our experience many businesses fall into the trap of overprovisioning when it comes to cloud services. This means they secure more user licenses and more features than you actually need. Cloud service providers tend to make it as easy as possible for you to sign up for additional features and licenses, and it can quickly get out of hand as your workforce expands and evolves.

If there’s one thing we hate it’s waste. Therefore it is vital that you analyse your workload requirements regularly and carefully resize your instances accordingly. Use tools provided by your cloud service provider to identify and adjust the capacity you are using. After all why pay extra for services and licenses that are irrelevant to your business?

Use Reserved Instances and Savings Plans

Many cloud providers will offer cost saver options like Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans. These are designed to allow businesses to commit to a specific amount of usage. This is in exchange for discounted rates and by leveraging these options, you can often significantly reduce your cloud costs over time.

Once you have carefully analysed your workload and usage patterns, you can determine the most cost-efficient capacity or savings plan for your business. Find a plan that best aligns with your business’s long-term goals and stick with it.

Install an Automated Scaling Process

A dynamic company should always have dynamic resource allocation. By installing automated scaling policies, you can ensure that the infrastructure of your business scales up or down based on your most accurate demands. This allows you to optimise performance whilst preventing bloat and overprovisioning during periods of low activity.

Many cloud services as standard enable you to set predefined scaling policies. For example Autoscale in Azure. These features help you to ensure an efficient utilisation of resources without needing to manually change it over yourself!

Track and Optimise Storage

Storage costs can accumulate quickly. This is especially true when your data is not reviewed and archived regularly. Your best move is to estimate your storage needs, and then put in place lifecycle policies which will allow you to automatically downsize lesser-used data.

Regularly review and delete any unnecessary data to free up storage space. It is vital that you stay proactive when it comes to storage management. This will help you to significantly reduce costs associated with data storage.

Schedule Your Cloud Resources

Schedule your cloud resources so they are only running as and when you need him.  For example if your business shuts at weekends, then turn off development, testing and staging environments during nights and weekends. You can also scale down environments during off-peak hours.

Use available tools to automate the scheduling of your cloud resources based on your own defined automated rules and policies.

Delete Unused or Orphaned Cloud Resources

We’re all human, and at times human error slips in. There are times you may forget to delete cloud resources that you may not actually need any more. In our experience, these can include:

• Snapshots
• Backups
• Load Balancers
• Unused Accounts
• IP Addresses

These can accumulate over time and really rack up the unnecessary costs for your business. The main way to avoid these spiralling costs is by regularly auditing your cloud and deleting any unused resources your business doesn’t currently use.

Weed out Duplicate Services

We don’t want to sound like a broken record, but a large part of this process is the auditing, discovery and deletion of duplicate and unnecessary services. It may sound like common sense, however at the end of the day it’s a vital resource management observation. Different departments in the same organisation may be stuck using duplicate services.

If marketing is using one task management application, and sales is using something completely unconnected, you are wasting money and potential.

Identify a tool that works for everyone, and you’ll not only save money, but improve collaboration and productivity.

Embrace Serverless Architecture

Serverless computing allows businesses to run applications without managing the underlying infrastructure. The beauty of this being you pay only for the actual compute resources used for your processes. This eliminates the need for provisioning and maintaining servers. This allows you to eliminate large amounts of cloud waste.

Schedule a Call and Eliminate Cloud Waste Today

By following these steps you can reduce cloud waste in your organisation. If you don’t have the bandwidth or team to commit to starting these steps yourself, feel free to organise a call with our team today and we can get you on the right path!