Cloud computing has revolutionized business operations by offering scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency. However, cloud services also have a downside: cloud waste.
Cloud waste is the unnecessary spending of resources and money on cloud services that are often not fully utilized or optimized – about 32% of cloud spending is wasted. This figure can lead to budget concerns as spending skyrockets.
But this figure also holds opportunity. Optimizing your use of cloud tools can reduce nearly a third of cloud spending.
So, how can you reduce cloud waste in your business and save money? Here are some clever tactics to consider.
Conduct a Comprehensive Cloud Audit
Before implementing any cost-cutting strategies, conduct an audit. It’s essential to have a clear understanding of your current cloud usage. Conducting a comprehensive cloud audit allows you to identify the following:
- Underutilized resources
- Overprovisioned instances
- Unnecessary services
Use cloud management tools to generate reports and look at usage patterns, costs, and performance metrics. This initial assessment forms the foundation for implementing effective waste reduction tactics.
Put in Place Right-Sizing Strategies
Right-sizing involves matching cloud resources to the actual demands of your workloads. Many businesses fall into the trap of overprovisioning, which means securing more user licenses or features than they need. This leads to increased costs and unnecessary waste.
Analyze your workload requirements and resize instances accordingly. Use tools provided by your cloud service provider to identify and adjust instances’ capacity. This ensures that you only pay for the resources you truly need.
Use Reserved Instances and Savings Plans
Cloud providers offer cost-saving options like Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans. These allow businesses to commit to a specific amount of usage in exchange for discounted rates. You can significantly reduce your cloud costs over time by leveraging these options.
Carefully analyze your workload and usage patterns, then determine the most cost-effective reserved capacity or savings plan. Find a plan that aligns with your business’s long-term goals.
Install Automated Scaling Policies
Dynamic workloads require dynamic resource allocation. Install automated scaling policies. These ensure that your infrastructure scales up or down based on demand, optimizing performance and preventing overprovisioning during periods of low activity.
Cloud services enable you to set predefined scaling policies. Examples are AWS Auto Scaling and Autoscale in Azure. These features help ensure efficient resource utilization without manual intervention.
Track and Optimize Storage
Storage costs can accumulate quickly, especially when data is not regularly reviewed and archived. Estimate your storage needs, then implement lifecycle policies to automatically downsize lesser-used data, such as transitioning less frequently accessed data to lower-cost storage options.
Review and delete unnecessary data regularly to free up storage space. Adopting a proactive approach to storage management can help you significantly reduce the costs associated with data storage.
Schedule Your Cloud Resources
Schedule your cloud resources to run only when you need them. For example, turn off development, testing, or staging environments at night and on weekends, or scale down your production environment during off-peak hours.
Use available tools to automate the scheduling of your cloud resources. Base this on automated rules and policies that you define.
Delete Unused or Orphaned Cloud Resources
Sometimes, you may forget or neglect to delete cloud resources you no longer need or use. This can include:
- Snapshots
- Backups
- Volumes
- Load balancers
- IP addresses
- Unused accounts
These resources can accumulate over time and incur unnecessary costs. To avoid this, you should regularly audit your cloud environment and delete unused or orphaned resources your business is not using. You can often use cloud provider tools to find and remove these.
Weed Out Duplicate Services
Different departments in the same organization may be using duplicate services. Marketing may use one task management app, while Sales uses a different one. Centralize cloud resources and remove duplicate tools.
Everyone using the same cloud tool for the same function can save money and enhance collaboration, reporting, and data integration.
Embrace Serverless Architecture
Serverless computing (cloud computing) allows businesses to run applications without managing the underlying infrastructure. You pay only for the computing resources used for your processes, eliminating the need to provision and maintain servers and reducing operational complexity and costs.
Consider migrating suitable workloads to a serverless model to help you optimize resource use and cut cloud waste.
Schedule a Cloud Optimization Assessment Today!
By following these clever tactics, you can reduce cloud waste in your business and optimize your cloud spending. This will help you save money and improve operational efficiency and environmental sustainability.
Are you struggling with expanding cloud costs? Need help identifying and removing cloud waste?
Our team of cloud experts can help you! Contact us today to schedule your assessment.