Smart Tactics to Reduce Cloud Waste at Your Business

Cloud computing has revolutionized the way businesses operate. It offers scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency but also comes with a downside: cloud waste.

Cloud waste is the unnecessary spending of resources and money on cloud services. These services are often not fully utilized or optimized. About 32% of cloud spending is wasted, which can lead to budget concerns as spending skyrockets.

But that figure also holds opportunity. It means that you can reduce nearly a third of cloud spending by optimizing how you use cloud tools.

So, how can you reduce cloud waste at your business and save money? Here are some smart tactics to consider.

Conduct a Comprehensive Cloud Audit

Before implementing any cost-cutting strategies, conduct an audit. It is essential to have a clear understanding of your current cloud usage. Conducting a comprehensive cloud audit allows you to identify underutilized resources, overprovisioned instances and unnecessary services.

Use cloud management tools to generate reports. Look at usage patterns, costs, and performance metrics. This initial assessment forms the foundation for implementing effective waste reduction tactics.

Put in Place Right-Sizing Strategies

Right-sizing involves matching your cloud resources to the actual demands of your workloads. Many businesses fall into the trap of securing more user licenses or features than they need. “Overprovisioning” leads to increased costs and unnecessary waste.

Analyze your workload requirements and resize instances accordingly. Use tools provided by your cloud- service provider to identify and adjust the capacity of instances, ensuring you only pay for the resources you truly need.

Use Reserved Instances and Savings Plans

Cloud providers offer cost-saving options like Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans, which allow businesses to commit to a specific amount of usage in exchange for discounted rates. By leveraging these options, you can significantly reduce your cloud costs over time.

After carefully analyzing your workload and usage patterns, determine the most cost-effective reserved capacity or savings plan that aligns with your business's long-term goals.

Install Automated Scaling Policies

Dynamic workloads require dynamic resource allocation. Install automated scaling policies to ensure that your infrastructure scales up or down based on demand, optimizes performance, and prevents overprovisioning during periods of low activity.

Cloud services enable you to set predefined policies for scaling. Examples include AWS Auto Scaling and Autoscale in Azure. These features help ensure efficient resource utilization without manual intervention.

Track and Optimize Storage

Storage costs can accumulate quickly. This is especially true when data is not regularly reviewed and archived. Estimate your storage needs. Then, put in place lifecycle policies to automatically downsize lesser-used data such as transitioning less frequently accessed data to lower-cost storage options.

To significantly reduce costs associated with data storage, regularly review and delete unnecessary data and adopt a proactive approach to storage management.

Schedule Your Cloud Resources

Schedule your cloud resources to run only when you need them. For example, turn off development, testing, or staging environments during nights and weekends or scale down your production environment during off-peak hours.

Automate the scheduling of your cloud resources using rules and policies that you define.

Delete Unused or Orphaned Cloud Resources

Sometimes, you may forget or neglect to delete cloud resources. Resources that you no longer need or use can include snapshots, backups, volumes, load balancers, IP addresses, and unused accounts.

These resources can accumulate over time and incur unnecessary costs. To avoid this, regularly audit your cloud environment and delete any unused or orphaned resources your business is not using. You can often use cloud provider tools to find and remove these orphaned resources.

Weed Out Duplicate Services

Different departments in the same organization may be using duplicate services. Marketing may use one task management app, while Sales uses a different one. Centralize cloud resources and remove duplicate tools.

Implementing uniform adoption of a single cloud tool among all users for the same function can save money and enhance collaboration, reporting, and data integration.

Embrace Serverless Architecture

Serverless computing allows businesses to run applications without managing the underlying infrastructure. You pay only for the actual compute resources used for your processes. Eliminating the need for provisioning and maintaining servers reduces both operational complexity and costs. Consider optimizing your resource use and migrate suitable workloads to a serverless model.

Schedule a Cloud Optimization Assessment Today!

By following these smart tactics, you can reduce cloud waste, optimize cloud spending, improve operational efficiency and contribute to a more sustainable environment.

Are you struggling with expanding cloud costs? Need help identifying and removing cloud waste? Our team of cloud experts can help you!

Contact us today to schedule your assessment.

Article used with permission from The Technology Press.