Coming Up with Proper Protocols to Prevent Cloud Wastage

Need an economical way to obtain the software and services you need to integrate within your business operations? For any business, especially start-ups, the cloud offers an essential differentiator. Although if you have an idea, you can start your business and make it to run on IT infrastructure, yet you require minimal capital expenditure. Thus, cloud computing infrastructure will help you to focus more on running your business than IT.



Vikas Katoch
VP – IT Services

However, as they say, “Too much of a good thing is a waste”. If you are not careful about how you utilize the cloud, soon you will find yourself experiencing “cloud waste”. When more cloud resources are being consumed than your business actually needs, cloud waste occurs. Often, businesses rely on the visibility on their monthly bills from their cloud provider to manage their expenditure and usage costs. This can lead to serious overages or extra costs for unused applications.

Have a quick look at some tips that will assist organizations with coming up with a plan to avoid cloud wastage:

Focus on asset utilization

Finding the underutilized assets in the cloud in a timely manner is easier said than done. For a large enterprise, the bills from the cloud providers come monthly and may contain number of charges mixed together. If you are waiting to act until you get see a new bill, you may end up with the charges that have been idle for a month or more and should have downsized before now.

Managing multiple clouds with multiple accounts is much more difficult. However, coming up with the proper protocols and working with your cloud service provider can get you the electronic billing information much quicker. This will allow you to be proactive with preventing a massive amount of unused application charges or even help you avoid usage overages.

Automate as much as you can

Are you taking an initiative towards cloud cost optimization? The focus should be on automating as many processes as possible. It will eventually remove much of the human element of decision-making, thus establishing a system of continuous improvement. This step has assisted various large organizations to save thousands of dollars a month. In addition, it has also enabled them to understand which and just how much business divisions are spending in the cloud.

Identify the abandoned applications

You might be unaware of applications that once seemed to be promising but are no longer producing the results that you expected inside an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) or software-as-a-service (SaaS) environment. If the application is abandoned from a business or internal perspective, leaving you unaware of its existence, you need to create a procedure to help you identify these abandoned applications. Once identified, you can then approve them for decommissioning. This is one of the best options to stop wasteful spending.

Right-size your cloud instances

When choosing the amount of CPU, memory and storage to be allocated to a virtual machine for an application, bigger is often considered better. However, the resources that are allocated to an instance are usually overinflated. It is important that administrators right-size their cloud instances from the beginning.

Audit your cloud resources

Set up a schedule to audit your cloud resources on a regular basis. Depending on the size of your organization, this can be weekly, monthly or even quarterly. You need to make sure that the licenses that you have purchased do not exceed the current usage. Review everything, from operating systems to the SaaS licenses and virtual applications. To make it a bit easier, you can also use license management tools and strategies to help perform thorough licensing audits.

Create an automated schedule

If your applications are accessed during specific hours of the day, keeping all your instances up and running for 24/7 is not feasible and will end up wasting money. It is best to establish an automated schedule that will turn your instances off when not in use. Just explore a variety of cloud platforms that will offer the best scheduling tools capable of working in the multi-cloud environments.

These tips can help you to enjoy all the benefits that cloud computing can provide to your business. With more cloud services comes increased cloud spend, which will make managing the cloud costs a critical task. It requires proper cost management. You can utilize the right mix of people, processes and technology to trim the cloud fat, thus simultaneously trimming the cloud waste. Making use of right technology resources are required for your business success and will help further prevent a staggering monthly bill.

Proper Oversight and Planning Is What All You Need

Proper protocols set in place can prevent cloud wastage wherever cloud services are implemented. Just take a quick look at your cloud setup to spot the cloud waste in your company’s cloud solutions. If you need assistance, you can also consult an IT professional who will help you to determine whether there is any cloud waste or not and can suggest any changes that will remove the waste and boost operational efficiency.