How to Manage Cloud Costs
More and more businesses are moving to the cloud and for good reason: moving to the cloud can drastically cut costs for any business. Rather than utilizing on-premise services, enterprises have the assurance that their data and applications are managed by one of the major cloud vendors out there, freeing up time-consuming and costly resources. IDC estimates that global public cloud services and infrastructure spending will be $370 billion by 2022.
However, moving your business to AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform for example, does have a darker side. Although it seems like a no-brainer – swapping costly hardware from on-premise data centers for lower-costing services in the cloud that are managed for you – there is a problem that hasn’t really been discussed until relatively recently. Once you switch to the cloud, how much visibility do you really have into your cloud resources?
Cloud Waste – an Ever-growing Problem
While businesses have cut costs by moving their physical data center into the cloud, there is still more to do to control costs, more savings to be captured. Two of the biggest problems that introduce cloud waste include idle resources and over-provisioned resources. Let’s take a look at each of these.
Idle Resources
Idle resources are resources such as instances or VMs that you are paying for 24x7 but are only used occasionally or sporadically. An example of this is a case in point: At Predecir we identified for one of our customers that one of their servers was used for just 2 days over a 6-month period, yet they were paying full fare for this resource. When you consider how much idle resources add up, the cost-savings can be shocking.
Over-provisioned Resources
Over-provisioned resources are resources that you are paying for in a size that is not fully needed or warranted. Here – one size does not fit all. Most cloud vendors will sell you “one size up” than what you need today in order to accommodate growth, yet you may never need such extra padding. So, identifying and reducing this extra padding by “right-sizing” can also drastically reduce that over inflated cloud bill.
More and more cloud customers are now turning to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to tackle this cloud waste problem and it is easy to see why. Such technology can sniff out idle and over-provisioned resources while also providing forecasting and long-term prediction that can better manage your overall cloud performance.
About Predecir
Predecir provides cutting-edge technology and services that enable our clients to optimize their cloud usage while minimizing their total monthly spend. We have developed proprietary actionable predictive analytics to stay ahead of the curve and improve profit margin and EBITDA. Our system intelligently analyzes the short- and long-term needs of capital investment for resources to optimize the infrastructure footprint in AWS, Azure, and Google cloud environments as well as private and hybrid cloud deployments. Contact us via our website or email patty@predecir.net to talk to a sales representative or to schedule a demo.