Continued fears and signals of an impending economic recession have pushed businesses to be more cost-conscious with their finances. According to CNBC, some enterprises are softening spend and businesses are trimming costs effectively creating a slowdown in public cloud growth.
However, technology spending is expected to remain steady in the coming year. According to a survey by IBM, technology buyers have clear directives and plans to invest in infrastructure, secure their entire digital ecosystem, and make their businesses more sustainable and resilient.
For many, 2023 will be about carefully moving forward with company cloud journeys through migrations, hybrid cloud, and more with the help of a trusted cloud advisor. It will also be about reducing cloud costs without sacrificing reliability and performance. This post will discuss different ways to optimize cloud spend and reduce costs.
How to Reduce Cloud Costs
The public cloud went through rapid growth over the past decade. This led to powerful efficiencies and enormous data storage for businesses. However, the popularity of cloud solutions like AWS and Azure left businesses with a complex enterprise system to manage.
Among the challenges is proper cost management. For the last several years, growth was the strategic imperative and many businesses wanted to move fast. This led to unmanaged cloud resources and reactive cost optimizations. Improper cloud management leads to expensive consequences like too many instances running at inefficient times. While managing costs can be a challenge, it’s equally an opportunity to drive efficient consumption of IT. So how can you be proactive about cloud spend?
1. Automation
At a high level, automation allows you to look for inefficient processes while reducing manual or repeated work. Improving these areas opens up resources and improves productivity to ultimately reduce cloud spend.
As part of a cloud strategy, this also means allowing for faster performance and better resource allocation. Automation can prompt further conversations about improvements that can be made to the existing processes to benefit the entire business. Finally, even with automation and other time-saving capabilities of public cloud, real people are still needed behind the scenes to best support your environments.
Read our article: The Data Explosion and Hidden Data Storage Costs in the Cloud – Could Object Storage Be the Answer?
2. Diagnostics
Using diagnostic tools and being proactive about cost optimization can help organizations significantly reduce their cloud spend. Often underrated, diagnostics is a great way to re-examine your expenses. By having access to this information, organizations can find and face any problems before they become costly.
Additionally, powerful optimization solutions can be used to maximize resource utilization and identify opportunities to spin instances up or down, creating cost savings. With the right combination of diagnostic and optimization tools, businesses can ensure that their cloud spend is monitored closely and actively managed in order to keep costs down.
3. Find unutilized instances
One way to reduce cloud spend is by identifying and eliminating any unused services. Organizations should begin by reviewing their usage data to find resources that aren’t being used. A thorough review can also help identify areas that are expensive, allowing for better decisions on how to optimize cloud computing costs. Additionally, organizations should look into solutions that provide analytics on resources. This can help make this process more of a routine and avoid mass clean-ups.
4. Keep seasonality in mind
Public clouds are often seen as a quick source of capacity and a way to keep IT infrastructure costs down. However, while the public cloud’s ability to quickly spin up additional capacity is usually a primary advantage, it’s also how cloud costs can escalate out of control.
Instead of leaving resources running for no reason, keep any seasonal or predictable resource needs in mind. This can help you to better plan ahead to only use what you actually need. Careful management and monitoring of your cloud resources can lead to significant cost savings.
The Right Managed Cloud Partner
Light Edge’s team of cloud experts has helped organizations plan, migrate, and manage cloud environments with a keen eye on costs and cloud spend. Ultimately, our team of experienced professionals provides support that covers all facets of cloud from migration to monitoring, optimization, and much more.
With Light Edge cloud managed services, you can feel confident throughout your entire cloud journey. Contact us below if you have questions about managing cloud costs or if you’re ready to get help in reducing cloud spend.
