The cloud technology is supposed to be a source of saving money and unlocking new opportunities for enterprises. Contrary to this notion, it costs so much (if it is not managed correctly). How is cloud technology costing so much?
One aspect could be the deployment approach. Instead of moving to the cloud in stages, companies switch to the cloud in one big switch. This sudden change, if not appropriately managed, can cost the IT teams heavily. However, here are four significant aspects to help you to save cloud cost.
1 – Track and Identify the Orphaned Resources
Who would like to be charged for instances that you thought you had closed? These orphaned resources are one of the biggest causes of cloud waste. This is the case when you close compute resources but forget to turn off the storage resources.
It is the same situation as installing any application on your computer. Even after uninstalling the application, the installation file still exists in the system. However, here you are not charged for storage on your system, like in the cloud space.
2 – Don’t Assume, Be Sure About The Required Capacity
It is essential to reduce wastage capacity. Companies purchase a higher volume of capacity, assuming they need to purchase the same server capacity as on-premises data center.
However, companies fail to acknowledge that 80% of companies have more server capacity on-site than they’ll ever actually use. Thus, companies are paying more than they should be for the resources they will not use.
Moreover, cloud technology’s flexibility feature enables users to increase or decrease resources based on their requirements. Why make false assumptions when you can instantly get the required resources whenever you need it. Thus, timely evaluation and optimization of the resources will help in cutting the cloud cost.
3 – Don’t’ Leave Your VMs running unnecessarily.
There are several companies that waste cloud spend by leaving the VMs running 24×7. Sometimes it seems to keep the instances running important, but unused VMs should be identified and shutdown.
4 – Right Selection of Region
Another reason for cloud wastage is selecting an incorrect cloud region. The servers running virtual machines are located in different locations across the globe, which means costs vary depending on taxes, operating costs, and energy expenses.
Selecting the appropriate region for your workloads will surely help reduce the cloud wastage i.e., saving you cloud cost.
Despite the importance of this aspect, as per the RightScale report, only a small number of enterprises implemented a system for automatically switching regions closing down VMs to save money.