The blessing and curse of cloud computing is flexibility. Now more than ever, companies leveraging the cloud are being revered for their ability to scale up usage of critical applications remotely for employees working from home, while in the same breath lambasted as IT costs sky-rocket. And in the midst of soaring usage, capacity, and cost come budget-cuts to fend off any other necessary evils during this challenging time.
Gartner states that “in the new era of cloud, cost optimization will be crucial.” So how are companies approaching cost-cutting and cloud optimization during this time? Here’s our advice on how to cut cloud costs amidst rising use and dependency.
- Look into a multi-cloud or hybrid strategy: Multicloud strategies will reduce vendor dependency for two-thirds of organizations through 2024. CIOs looking to adopt a multi-cloud strategy should determine the specific issues that they want it to address, such as reducing vendor lock-in or mitigating service disruption risks. Understand that a multi-cloud strategy will not automatically solve application portability. (Gartner)
- Find new paths to efficiency: Upgrade servers or keep an eye out for new services from cloud providers. It’s hard to stay on top of upgrades, especially if they’re not auto-installed, but one way to cut costs is to keep track of new upgrades, application updates, or more efficient services as they come out from cloud providers.
- Understand your cloud expenses: Look into your cloud costs with a magnifying glass. Be sure you can see all cloud instances throughout your company. Finding a solution that provides full visibility of all cloud activity from a single pane of glass is crucial.
- Optimize your performance by streamlining workflows: Make sure you know where your application bottlenecks are. Look for ways to get proactive recommendations across infrastructure tiers on placing new apps, rebalancing existing workloads, and right-sizing workloads.
If you’re running into issues cutting your cloud costs, reach out to a Virtana specialist who can walk you through a variety of free trial services, including right-sizing your infrastructure to pinpoint areas of underutilization.
Scott Leatherman
