8 Tips To Cut Costs On Multi-Cloud Spending

Here are two significant statistics: a) According to the research firm Gartner, the estimated cost for global expenditure on public cloud infrastructure was predicted to be a sum of $39.5 billion for the year 2019, and b) ParkMyCloud, a cloud cost management firm, with reference to the figure predicted by Gartner, estimated wasteful spending of about $14 billion or more by companies, on unnecessary cloud infrastructure.

The attention-grabbing highlight of these statistics is the high probability of gross miscalculation and some level of unwise decision-making by companies investing whopping sums of money on cloud.

What can be the possible causes of such a huge sunk cost? According to IT experts and leaders in the field of cloud computing, there are two blatant culprits. One, Idle or stagnant resources, and two, overprovisioning. The first cause is to do with such resources that you are spending money on but not using in the same proportion, for example- a per-hour model. The second cause is related to over-preparing for such future scenarios that may not ever occur.

Apart from these ‘money-draining’ factors, there are many more too.

You can continuously evaluate and introspect to dig more causes of wasteful spending, but won’t it be better to shift your focus on a positive action plan instead? In other words, some tips to lower costs on multi-cloud spending can help you better understand the do’s and don’ts of this subject.

As recommended by multi-cloud experts, here are some tips for you to ward off money-draining factors and manage cloud spending effectively. Read on.

1. Focus on the basics:

Begin with the basics. In most cases, organizations miss out on planning a resource utilization strategy. Without even realizing in time, costs of underutilized or unutilized resources keep accumulating. The key to significantly reduce wasteful expenditure is, identifying essential and non-essential cloud services and resources. Using automated tools or seeking multi-cloud experts’ help is also a good option for timely management of resources.

2. Keep a check on non-production or idle instances:

Non-production instances can consume a massive chunk of your monetary resources. Despite the requirement of, say, 1-5% of CPU utilization, you may be charged for a 100% utilization by your service provider. To avoid overpaying, regularly filter your storage and review resource allocation. It is evolving rather than a static requirement.

3. Use monitoring tools:

All mischief is managed by monitoring and all chaos by order. Cloud costs are no exception. By deploying monitoring tools, you can save tremendous costs on cloud usage. The monitoring has dual-target areas. One, to check cloud services within IT management and the other to identify cloud services outside of IT management. Services falling in the latter category shoot up cloud spending and require proactive governing. For monitoring purposes, tools like heatmap and other automated designs come in handy.

4. Choose goals over deadlines:

According to multi-cloud experts, effective cost management is possible when it is always on your mind while making plans related to cloud implementation or migration. You must fix regular goals according to your business needs and then initiate cloud migration. This also applies to the monitoring of cloud activity. You must resort to a system of alerts or notifications to check on the excesses in cloud usage.

5. Check your application’s compatibility with the cloud:

It is a basic hack to save costs. Many a time, applications are not designed to suit cloud infrastructure. In such a case, you must avoid the migration of those applications to the cloud. If done otherwise, wrong applications can hamper performance and raise costs. With an informed approach, distinguish between applications that can work better on cloud and on-premise.

6. Don’t miss the big picture:

Don’t scourge for each buck to save costs. Sometimes a unit wise cheap service can add up to a huge bomb of money and vice versa. Your goal must be to ensure cost optimization alongside performance reliability.

7. Balance your resource sizing:

It simply translates into ‘right-sizing’ your resources to the specific needs and performance of different machines (virtual). This step is a way towards overall infrastructure optimization.

8. Make resource optimization a full-time occupation:

As cloud is highly potent, it can do both things; run high on efficiency, and go berserk. So, only a high level of expertise and consistent attention can effectively monitor it. From a cost-cutting perspective, this may not be an attractive idea for organizations, but it can ensure strict resource optimization in the long haul.