Maximizing ROI with CloudOps: Cloud Cost Optimization

When you decide to move to the Cloud, cost-saving is the prime motivator. However, an ironic fact is that over 80 percent of organizations end up spending more on the Cloud after migrating to it.

The good news is – you overshoot the set budget because you miss out on optimizing the Cloud operations and infrastructure; Cloud itself is not responsible for the issue. So, opting for good cost-optimization strategies with the help of CloudOps can unlock a low-cost, high-performing Cloud infra for you.

10 proven ways to optimize Cloud costs with CloudOps

CloudOps help automate the monitoring, instrumentation, and management of Cloud components, such as containers and workloads. To maximize the ROI, it is essential that your organization optimizes Cloud costs for the highest productivity with CloudOps.

Read the proven cost-optimization methods suggested by CloudOps experts at Opsio below

1. Monitor your Cloud thoroughly

Monitoring your Cloud's operations is the first step towards optimizing them.

Manually doing this task is too tedious. However, utilizing CloudOps to automate the cloud infrastructure monitoring process is comparatively easy.

CloudOps monitoring gives you better insights into your Cloud and improves the visibility of your infrastructure. It also simplifies Cloud infrastructure management, troubleshooting, and maintenance. With the details collected through process/service monitoring, determining the areas where cost-cutting can be done is easier too.

2. Define all essential metrics

CloudOps allows you to calculate how your Cloud performs on various aspects – automatedly. Leveraging this capability, you can create various metrics for performance measurement, resource usage tracking, idle resources, etc.

While you do so, do not forget to have the Cloud cost metrics that could help you understand process-wise expenditure and, thereby, reduce it. For example, you can track cost per team, cost per customer, cost per application, cost per service, and so on.

3. Modernize your Cloud Infrastructure

When organizations migrate to Cloud, refactoring their applications, as well as processes, is essential. Deep application modernization can reduce hidden costs that your lift-and-shift migration has forced onto your Cloud infrastructure. It helps you reduce CI/CD costs too.

4. Collect, analyze, and utilize data efficiently

CloudOps automation tools are great at fetching the data that your team should be keeping an eye on. There also are tools to deploy advanced analytics and automated resource monitoring processes to collect more useful data.

Analyzing this data/information is a great way to understand your Cloud infrastructure and realize how to make it perform better. You can utilize the Cloud data for in-depth testing, background processing batch analytics, and reporting in order to improve your infrastructure-related decision-making and intelligence. Doing so will significantly cut down the extra costs.

5. Perform Resource Optimization from time to time

Using CloudOps, it becomes easy to do the following:

Understand your processes;
Figure out which resources are idle;
Guess which storage space can be freed;
Eliminate unnecessary traffic across zones and regions;
Perform network configurations as per the updated business needs;
Find non-production environments that are sitting in your Cloud for days;
Mark potential areas where cost-cutting is possible, and so on.

With this knowledge, resource optimization and cost-cutting become straightforward tasks.

6. Be a proactive decision-maker as an organization

CloudOps frees you from manually looking into your Cloud infrastructure and network for trivial things. It helps you quickly access a broad picture of your Cloud with much less effort. With real-time analytics data it puts on your fingerprints, organizational decision-making becomes easy and effective.

To maximize your ROI through CloudOps, you must use take quick decisions related to the following with its help:

Cloud resources purchase management
Cloud storage selection and management
Scaling or shrinking the Cloud

7. Use Reserved and Spot Instances

When you turn to your Cloud provider after the demand for a resource arrives, it will have a higher cost. In case you don’t know, Cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure have incentivizing plans/features for committed customers. You can go for -

Reserved Instances when you want some resources for 1-3 years. It will save you up to 33%.
Spot Instances when you want to leverage the Cloud's unused capacity at less expenditure for your low-priority instances, you can save up to 90% with ease.

Not sure how to find plans or Cloud providers offering such benefits? Your CloudOps experts or CloudOps support team must be able to tell. Ask them.

8. Check your licenses

Unnecessary licenses, as well as expired licenses for useful applications, add to business operations (or non-operations) costs. With the help of CloudOps, you can track your licenses better and save this cost. It will also help you and your team operate and work smoothly.

9. Prioritize security

An unsecured Cloud is the riskiest thing to own for an organization. You put your data, assets, business, and customers at stake when your team overlooks security.

As CloudOps can help you automate a few security operations while improving others, opting for it is undoubtedly a great way to save costs and build trust in the market.

10. Leverage automation

CloudOps ensure that your business takes full advantage of automation – a practice that inherently aims at cost-cutting. You can opt for the following paths (a few or all) progressively and reduce your operations cost