Unless you are one of the 1% of enterprises that have zero workloads running in the public cloud, you need a cloud cost optimization tool. Yes, you do. And if you have workloads running in multiple public clouds—which somewhere in the neighborhood of 85% of enterprises do—you really need a cloud cost optimization tool. If I’m preaching to the choir, feel free to skip to the end of this article where you’ll find a link to try Virtana Optimize for free. But if you (or the powers that be in your company) are still not convinced, here are the five most common reasons enterprises don’t believe they need a cloud cost optimization tool, and why they are wrong.
Misconception #1: You think you don’t have the budget to deploy a cloud cost optimization tool.
The reality is that you can’t afford not to deploy a cloud cost optimization tool. Take out a piece of paper and write down your current public cloud spend. Now, calculate 30% of the total and write that number down. By all accounts, those dollars are being wasted. You’ve just found the budget for a new cloud cost optimization tool, along with big savings you can reallocate elsewhere. In fact, Virtana Optimize can reduce your cloud costs immediately by simply using the free version, and the full solution usually pays for itself 5-10 times over in the first year.
Misconception #2: You’re confident you already have cloud cost optimization under control
You’re probably already performing some kind of rightsizing analysis. But, here’s the thing: when it comes to rightsizing, most tools only consider CPU usage. That’s an important factor, but it’s by no means the only one. If you don’t take other critical computing dimensions—such as network, memory, disk, and instance type—into account, you could end up creating a bottleneck in capacity, causing a slowdown in your application performance. And that can hardly be classified as “optimized.”
Misconception #3: You’re not concerned about public cloud costs
Maybe you’re not responsible for your organization’s cloud budget or held accountable for cloud spend, but you should be concerned about public cloud costs. Go back to the numbers you wrote down in misconception #1. Or, if you didn’t write anything down because you don’t have that information, take an educated guess. If you saved the company that much money, aren’t you likely to be able to unlock some additional budget for a different initiative, perhaps one that you are responsible for?
Misconception #4: You don’t have time to evaluate a new tool
This is a legitimate concern. When you think about the typical software evaluation process, you’re probably considering (and dreading) all the time and effort that goes into vendor meetings and PowerPoints, proof-of-concept installs, trials, etc. But the reality is that in just 10 minutes you can activate the free version of Virtana Optimize and get recommendations you can act on right now.
Misconception #5: You outsource cloud management, so you don’t need to worry about optimization
If you’re one of the growing number of companies who outsource cloud management, you’ve offloaded the work of cloud cost optimization to a partner. You have not, however, abdicated responsibility for the results delivered by that partner to the enterprise. If you can help them save you money and add more value to what they do for you, why wouldn’t you?
Virtana Optimize: Cloud cost optimization made easy
Virtana Optimize is the radically simple cloud transformation platform that allows you to optimize and rightsize your hybrid cloud workloads for performance, capacity, and cost.
Virtana Optimize radically simplifies management of your hybrid cloud IT infrastructure by optimizing cost, capacity, and performance in real time, on an ongoing basis. Virtana Optimize delivers deep insight into your cloud spend across multiple cloud provider so you can:
- Understand cloud costs through bill analysis capabilities and cost vs. utilization reports
- Automatically optimize cloud instances with rightsizing recommendations
- Identify unused compute instances, storage on stopped instances, and unattached storage blocks
- Easily track the amortized value of reservation discounts at the instance level and conduct what-if analysis to evaluate potential savings
Mark Heslop
Director of Product Marketing, Virtana
