Everyone is doing it. No, I am not talking about the latest Tik Tok challenge… The thing that everybody is doing—every company, that is—is that they are spending more money in the cloud than they need to. In fact, 82% of respondents in our own recent survey admitted that their organizations have incurred unnecessary cloud costs. Given enterprises’ overall lack of comprehensive visibility into cloud costs, I believe that a fair number of the remaining 18% haveneedlessly overspent, they are just not aware that this waste is happening. This is not mere speculation. Another survey we fielded asked respondents more specifically about abandoned and unused cloud resources, and only 3% of those respondents said they do not have any such resources.
Making the situation even more dire is the fact that the amount of waste is massive. By most estimates, cloud waste accounts for an average of 30% of all cloud spending. That is the average, so while some organizations may have far less, others have far more, which could add up to an eye-wateringly large number.
It does not have to be this way
Clearly, identifying and eliminating unnecessary cloud spend is not easy. If it were, waste would not be such a massive and pervasive problem. There is good news, though. By understanding the causes and adopting the capabilities to address them, you can get your cloud spending under control. Here are some resources to help you get started:
- How To Instantly Boost the ROI of Your Hybrid Cloud: Intro into cloud waste and how companies are trying to address it today
- 5 Ways Cloud Costs Can Spiral Out of Control: Overview of the factors that create cloud waste
- Is Your Cloud Cost Report Missing Critical Information?: Details you need for more informative, actionable cloud cost reports
- Cloud Cost Management: A Compendium of 49 Stats, Benefits, Hard Truths, Tips, and Requirements: A crash course in cloud cost management
The proof is in the real-world results
There is nothing like examples to illustrate the challenges you potentially face and the strategies and approaches that have been used to resolve them. Here are four examples that demonstrate how problematic cloud waste is and how companies are combating it with Virtana Optimize, which collects and analyzes data to enable organizations to get full visibility into all cloud costs and identify unused resources that can be eliminated.
Cloud cost challenge #1: A dynamic environment makes it hard to understand cloud costs
Given the dynamic nature of their business and how difficult it is to decipher cloud bills, the SSI Agvance IT team was struggling to identify sizing issues, idle resources, and other costly waste in their AWS environment. With Virtana Optimize, the company was able to:
- Find EBS volumes that were bigger than they needed to be and Windows-based servers running expensive SQL Standard that could be resized
- Identify servers not being used off hours that could be scheduled to only run during business hours
- Uncover EBS volumes that had been orphaned during an environment rebuild that wiped out all the servers to start from scratch but did not remove EBS volumes which continued to run up charges
- Determine that the backup process was retaining more backups than the company actually needed
And this wasall just from an initial round of optimization, which reduced the company’s monthly cloud spend by 12%. As the IS Team Lead noted, “While a 12% savings may not sound huge, this is a big impact considering it represents only a subset of total actions we are able to recommend thanks to Virtana Optimize.”
Cloud cost challenge #2: Underutilization was hard to spot
As a managed service provider, Perfect Image understands that when you are managing a business, avoiding unnecessary costs is just as important as avoiding downtime. And while their existing tooling would alert them if there was a performance problem, they had no way of getting notified when a server’s utilization was too high and fine-tuning was a manual process. Thanks to Virtana Optimize, they were able to:
- Identify areas where customers were oversubscribing and incurring higher costs than necessary
- Highlight a range of potential savings options, from conservative to aggressive, to support a variety of customer cost/risk profiles
Based on a proof-of-concept subset of data, the company anticipated an ROI of around 10 to 1.
Cloud cost challenge #3: Native tools did not provide the information needed in a way that was usable
Viewpost knows that when you are forced to rely on guesswork, you will end up overprovisioning, and they wanted to avoid that. But the native AWS tools—which pump out massive CSV files that contain a lot of data but do not make it easy to understand the details—created a lot of manual work and left a lot of gaps in understanding. Virtana Optimize enabled them to:
- Find overprovisioned instances
- Locate unused instances that could be decommissioned
The company was able to reduce its AWS costs by 50%. With recommendations based on constraints they defined, they were able to resize overprovisioned resources appropriately. And even with inevitable changes, they are able to keep costs steady on an ongoing basis.
Cloud cost challenge #4: Native tools did not make it easy to manage complex environments
As a SaaS company, Digital Guardian has to deliver a high-quality, high-availability experience to customers worldwide using multiple AWS regional centers to meet service and regulatory requirements. They had tried to use tags to make sense of it all, but the tagging was causing problems with AWS views and changes to object tags resulted in lost associations and groupings. With Virtana Optimize, they were able to:
- Understand the nuances of AWS resource selection to keep consumption in budget while also delivering on performance SLAs
- Identify overprovisioned SQL Server instances
With Virtana, the company was able to increase the efficiency of its AWS infrastructure resource usage by 45% while the number of EC2 server instances used grew from 650 to 800.
Deep dive: How a quarter million dollars got freed up without sacrificing performance
At this point, you may be anxious about how much cloud waste you have in your environment, racking up charges for resources you do not need. And you may be wondering exactly how to find that waste so you can reallocate the money to other areas of your business. Capgemini worked with a vacation-experience client to deliver significant cost savings without affecting application performance, and in just 10 days, they netted a 30% savings on overlooked AWS assets and an overall 10% optimization in AWS cost. This detailed project review provides a step-by-step tour of exactly how they did it.
Are you ready to stop wasting and start spending more responsibly in the cloud?
Virtana Optimize radically simplifies management of your hybrid cloud IT infrastructure by optimizing cost, capacity, and performance in real time on an ongoing basis. Part of the modular Virtana Platform, Virtana Optimize allows you to gain deep insight into your cloud spend across multiple cloud providers 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
David McNerney
Product Manager, Virtana
