Cloud costs for companies are up to 70 percent higher than would actually be necessary. That’s the – relatively daunting – conclusion reached by market research institute Gartner. But why is this the case when the cloud is widely known as a cost-saver?
Cloud costs are often too high
Moving to the cloud doesn’t necessarily save money. This sounds paradoxical at first because, after all, one of the key arguments in favor of moving to the cloud is usually that costs are scalable and therefore go down. In practice, however, this is only the case if there is a cost optimization theme in mind . And this is why the project fails in many small and medium-sized companies.
In other words, if you use the cloud but don’t hire anyone to keep track of factors such as number of users and amount of storage, you can end up paying a lot more. Conversely, you can save on high costs, you just need to know exactly what to look out for when using the cloud economically.
Common reasons for cloud costs being too high
The cloud offers tremendous savings potential, but it also needs to be exploited. A survey conducted by Gartner shows that this is often not the case. The reasons for sometimes even dramatic cost increases can be boiled down to a higher priority in the absence of cloud management . On the other hand, if you look at the details, it is clear that the reasons can be extremely varied. However, the problem usually starts with the fact that many companies do not know exactly where the costs are coming from.
There is also often a lack of understanding and transparency about billing models .provider. The example of AWS, after all, is one of the largest cloud providers: cost factors can be roughly attributed to the superior areas of requests, time, transmission, storage and extended services. Overall, however, the size of the offering extends to more than 175 services. Each of these typically has one or two cost dimensions. So it’s not surprising that this quickly confuses non-specialists.
Optimizing costs for the cloud – tips with immediate effect
Sometimes it’s just the sum of the small parts – this also applies to cloud costs. With a few simple tricks, you can save a lot of money, even if no company can avoid implementing overall cloud management. Now to our tips:
Establish a migration strategy:
The best advice for those who want to migrate but haven’t done so yet. Based on the “7-R Principle,” workloads and applications are migrated with a customized strategy that enables the full potential of the cloud at minimal cost.
Optimize the size and types of instances:
Why pay for something you don’t use? Make sure that the specified instance sizes and types actually meet your needs. If not, optimize them.
Changing your energy rate and optimizing your energy price:
What makes sense for private households can also save money for companies. At least once a year, check for changes in your electricity tariff and explore transition options. In a reduced form, this also works at the cloud provider level. There are lower cost per GB-month models, as well as models with reduced redundancy. If there is data that needs to be accessed very infrequently, it is recommended to switch to a class that takes longer to retrieve, but is also cheaper.
Check the testing and development environments:
Check to see if all environments really need to be up and running 24/7. The same goes for databases , elastic IP addresses and load balancers. Anything that does not need to be used all the time should be turned off. According to statistics, this alone can save 76 percent of the cost of these environments.
Our recommendation: Check if you already apply these tips; if not, you should consider whether these tips can also help your company use the cloud more cost-effectively.