Cloud costs have skyrocketed with more usage and remote work, and with 77% of organizations in a survey surprised by how much they spent, it might be time to revisit your cloud monitoring and usage strategy. Even Andreessen Horowitz has lended to the noise and frustrations of writing blank cheques to the cloud oligopoly (AWS, GCP & Azure) in a much debated blog post last year “The cost of cloud: a trillion-dollar paradox”, adding to the conversation on how cloud threatens to become a weight around the necks of large companies.
There is little debate in terms of how much cloud solutions have enabled and accelerated digital transformations, but proper planning is critical as demonstrated by a 53% average value realization gap of cloud investments in a PWC survey.
Why the increasing cloud costs?
There are many aspects of the cloud that can lead to increased costs. The lack of optimization, on demand pricing and inaccurate TCO Estimation are major contributors to the struggles that lead to the inflating cost of cloud use at a company-level.
Lack of optimization
For many companies around 30% of their cloud costs are being wasted. Companies will choose to over-provision their data instead of optimizing it to determine use and need. Choosing the best ways to store and access your data doesn’t come naturally and takes a fundamental understanding of your needs and desired outcomes. Companies who keep track of usage and patterns within the dataset see an average cost decrease of 15% immediately.
On-demand pricing
Unlike legacy data storage products, the cloud charges for the amount of data stored and the time spent accessing the data. Not having a handle on when and why data needs to be accessed and the business requirements associated will cause you to pay for more than you need.
Inaccurate cost estimation
A trend among cloud implementations is the under-estimation of cloud needs. Not understanding storage needs and data use will cause companies to under-budget their cloud requirements by an average of 23%. This can lead to choosing cloud solutions that do not fit business needs and paying for unexpected storage and computing time.
Lack of monitoring systems
Cloud solutions generally do not have out of the box monitoring capabilities that suit the specific needs of heavy cloud implementations. Monitoring both costs and granular usage usually produces immediate ROI.
Solutions to lower your cloud costs
The right cloud partner can help make optimizing your cloud scenario much less daunting, and there are a number of solutions that help manage and minimize the cost associated with the cloud.
Understanding business requirements
When migrating to the cloud it is imperative that an assessment of business needs, data, and priorities provides a deep understanding of business needs to all those involved. Knowing exactly how much data you have and the projected uses will help you find a data solution that can mitigate cost over time. No one data solution is universal so having the knowledge about your needs will aid in finding the unique solution that best suits the organization’s requirements.
Data analytics
Having access to the right analytics will help you pinpoint what data you need to prioritize. Having a good data visualization platform is the first step to understanding where you get your meaningful insights from. Being able to easily access analytics and in a way that makes sense will help your business understand what data matters most. Companies also utilize machine learning and AI technologies to aid in data optimization to help find the data that isn’t working and highlight the data that is.
Scalability
The cloud is scalable meaning you can access more data storage and computing as business needs change. Being able to auto-suspend data that is not being accessed will help you not pay for unused data.
Working with an experienced cloud consultancy like proSkale can help uncover immediate ROI. proSkale’s ready-made and easily customizable monitoring solutions can be implemented right away while the overall cloud approach is analyzed.
