While every organization knows that cloud computing is the way forward, industry research shows that many managers are still fearful that they’re paying over the odds for cloud and are not convinced that they’re making the most of their opportunities.

How to Reduce Cloud Costs

A proper audit and thorough assessment of an enterprise estate with a cloud asset intelligence solution is the starting point for cloud cost optimization.

The 4 key factors to identify opportunities to reduce cloud spend are:

• Instances
  • Remove idle instances
  • Switch off when not in use
  • Review performance metrics
• Storage
  • Correct wrong provision of disks
  • Improve archive processes
• Refactoring
  • Rework applications to make best use of cloud technologies
  • Take advantage of lower cost storage
• Account Management
  • Assign responsibility for cost management
  • Constant monitoring of granular billing analysis

Information is essential here. This should be through tools that ask the right questions and offer analysis and insight to help drive efficiencies and optimize costs. Your CFO is going to want to know whether your company is getting the best value from its investment in cloud and achieving the optimal ROI that perhaps formed a significant part of the business case.

But it’s not just about costs. Yes, it’s important to keep control of the bottom line but being agile and responsive to business needs, refocusing resources on innovation, speed of delivery and robustness in the face of adversity are all key objectives but perhaps not as easily measured.

Cloud Optimization Through Consistent Improvement Processes

Using specialist technology is the best way to provide the visibility, insight and guidance as to whether resources are being deployed in the best way and whether your system is working as efficiently as it should, delivering on the wider goals and benefits provided by cloud computing.

Scalable delivers cloud asset intelligence by enabling IT teams to view all cloud usage, including that initiated by business units without IT’s involvement and thereby stay in control of overall cloud costs. Accurate granular usage data ensures that smarter IT decisions can be made to optimize cloud investments on an ongoing basis.

Migrating systems to the cloud is one thing – ensuring they are running optimally for the lowest cost is another. The remote, hidden nature of cloud computing makes control of costs something many organizations struggle with. That’s where Scalable comes in.

Once an on-premise system has been migrated to a public cloud, it’s essential to monitor not just the costs but also the resources being used to support the service. Scalable’s Cloud Inventory and usage analysis capabilities ensure that not only do you have a clear view of all cloud inventory but that it’s is being paid for in the most expedient way. Comparisons can even be taken with rival clouds.

Forward Planning and Cloud Asset Intelligence

Scalable supports the three major public clouds – Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. The software maintains a complete view of your currently subscribed services. Clear reports ensure you see what you are paying for and who is using it.

Once you know what you have, optimization of cloud spend is a constant process. This will ensure cloud assets are being purchased efficiently and alert to opportunities to improve.

The next step on the journey is workload analysis – allowing workload demands and cloud resource demands to be reviewed, and opportunities to downsize and reduce spend identified – all while preserving performance.

Scalable provides the raw data, analysis and actionable insights to enable the optimal migration process at the lowest cost – and it does this agentlessly, with nothing to install on critical production business systems.

Cloud migration improves reliability, makes upgrades easier, leads to rapid provisioning of equipment and reduces overall costs. Scalable ensures that these benefits of cloud computing are maintained, giving the best results for your company.

In the final installment of this blog series, we’re going to take a closer look at the features of Scalable’s platform and what makes it ideal for supporting cloud migration and management of your production environment.