The cloud adoption rate is rising exponentially across the world. Organizations of all sizes and verticals are swiftly moving their data and applications from legacy systems to sophisticated cloud environments. The key reasons behind this shift are data protection, ease of application scalability, and ease of the utilization of advanced technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) through the cloud. However, after migration, many businesses struggle to monitor, forecast, and optimize costs related to cloud resources. This results in budget overshot and ineffectiveness.
Similarly, maintaining governance remains a challenge for many companies that host their assets in cloud environments. To effectively optimize cloud costs and uphold governance, hiring dedicated cloud consultants is the right choice. The expertise of consultants in cost optimization and governance enables businesses to reduce redundant expenditures and optimize the value of their cloud investments.
Hiring Cloud Consulting for ROI Optimization – A Business Priority
Whether businesses use Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud platforms, it’s crucial to understand, assess, and regulate what they spend on their cloud operations. By disregarding this, businesses might lose control over their cloud spending and waste resources at large. However, for organizations that work with multiple cloud vendors, monitoring costs and metrics using in-house professionals can be challenging. This is where dedicated cloud computing consultants can be of great help.
Typically, cloud consultants focus on three key aspects:
- Smart Cloud Services Procurement – Consultants help organizations in choosing the optimal resource utilization patterns and pricing models aligned with their requirements. They also undertake contract negotiations with cloud service providers to obtain custom SLAs and flexible pricing. This way, businesses can acquire essential cloud services at feasible rates, hence lessening overall costs and improving value.
- Cloud Capacity Optimization – By using automated monitoring tools, cloud consultants analyze the performance and utilization of resources like storage, virtual machines, and network bandwidth. This analysis enables consultants to apply the right strategies for scaling and removing idle instances.
- Risk Management – With the implementation of security controls and governance framework, consultants ensure that an organization’s cloud infrastructure remains resilient. This also helps businesses to mitigate security risks and improve transparency while gaining better control over cloud resources.
Cost Optimization and Governance – Best Practices Followed by Cloud Consultants
1. Setting up the Budget Plan
When organizations understand cloud utilization and billing patterns, they can easily plan for future investments and evade unforeseen costs. Hence, consultants prioritize creating a budget plan that aligns with the organization’s objectives. The consultants perform an extensive analysis of the organization’s present cloud infrastructure. This enables them to understand consumption and peak usage patterns, eventually, the requirements.
Consequently, they create a plan mentioning monthly budget limits and tolerable levels of spending for various cloud services. With this plan, businesses can ensure cost-efficient cloud operations and reduce excess spending. While creating this plan, consultants also collaborate with an organization’s key stakeholders and IT professionals for better buy-in.
2. Eliminating Idle Resources
In-house IT professionals can easily build computing instances, load balancers, and other resources as required for a cloud project. However, they might forget to decommission these resources when a particular project ends. These idle resources don’t fulfill any operational needs and incur additional costs, thereby resulting in huge financial waste. That’s why removing idle instances is crucial for efficient cost optimization.
Consultants from a reputable cloud consulting services provider use automated tools to remove idle instances and right-size resources. By implementing automated cloud management tools within the infrastructure, consultants detect unused resources and execute actions like disbanding, scaling down, or reallocation. In this scenario, automation reduces manual monitoring of cloud resources and helps consultants achieve long-term cost optimization.
3. Adopting Cloud Savings Plans
Several cloud service providers offer key savings plans like Reserved Instances and Spot Instances to help organizations host workloads with minimal upfront investment. However, hosting all kinds of applications or workloads under these plans isn’t feasible.
- Reserved Instances (RI) – By adopting this plan, companies can reserve particular computing resources for a certain time period, usually one to three years.
- Spot Instances (SI) – This plan allows businesses to acquire computing instances flexibly from cloud service providers on a rental basis. When the resource consumption exceeds the predetermined capacity level, the spot instances get terminated immediately.
Before adopting these plans, it is crucial for businesses to strategically evaluate their workload characteristics and feasibility. This is where dedicated cloud consultants can help. These consultants assess a workload or application on the basis of tolerance for interruptions and flexibility and define their feasibility. For hosting mission-critical applications that require greater availability, consultants opt for the RI plan and conversely, for workloads with unpredictable demand, consultants select the SI plan.
4. Reducing Data Transfer Fees
Cloud providers often incur charges when organizations migrate data between various regions, zones, and external networks. When an application hosted on the cloud environment is frequently moved or data is replicated across networks or regions, there is a significant increase in the data transfer fees, impacting the overall cloud spending.
Cloud consultants implement Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to reduce data transfer charges within an enterprise’s cloud infrastructure. CDN’s caching functionality helps in regulating traffic between the hosting environment and the rest of the Internet. This enables data to traverse long distances and various regions at minimal costs. Cloud consultants help in configuring and implementing CDNs based on business needs.
5. Tracking Performance
Effective monitoring of infrastructure resources is crucial for businesses to optimize cloud costs and maintain governance. That’s why cloud consultants implement performance tracking tools in the cloud infrastructure. This enables consultants to monitor cloud resources against baseline metrics, detect performance gaps, and easily resolve these hindrances and vulnerabilities. Moreover, mitigating risks and downtime becomes easier with resource tracking.
Tracking infrastructure resources helps both consultants and organizational users to optimize cloud utilization and eliminate over/under-provisioning. The insights offered by tracking tools enable organizations to control their resource allocation and meet actual demands easily.
Reasons to Hire Dedicated Cloud Consultants for Cost Optimization
- Meticulous Cost Audits
One of the key areas where dedicated cloud consultants are skilled in is executing cost audits. These audits include a meticulous evolution of cloud infrastructure to discover inadequacies, resource wastage, and areas for possible cost control. By eliminating redundant expenditures, consultants help businesses obtain greater control over cloud resources and consumption.
- Lower Maintenance Costs
The utilization of automated resource tracking and management tools delivers performance-related insights into cloud infrastructure. This helps in faster discovery and troubleshooting of infrastructure issues. Automation also reduces human intervention and maintenance expenditures. With performance insights, consultants can apply appropriate measures and make the infrastructure highly secure and compliant.
- Greater Cost Governance
Cloud cost governance is a key aspect that organizations working under highly regulated sectors or strict budget limitations cannot disregard. With the help of experts from a cloud consulting solutions provider, businesses can implement reliable cost governance frameworks and adhere to regulatory requirements effectively. These experts can strategically devise cloud cost management policies, regulate budget spending, and maintain better compliance.
- Continuous Optimization
Cloud service providers frequently update pricing models and resource functionalities. For in-house teams, tracking and implementing these updates can be challenging. And this is where cloud consultants make a difference as they remain updated on the recent upgrades and modifications across several cloud platforms. This enables them to establish a hybrid or multi-cloud environment and uncover new levels of cost-effectiveness for businesses.
Summing Up
Organizations operating cloud without adequate cost planning and management highly risk their financial resources and productivity. To attain better cloud cost optimization, teaming up with skilled consultants is advisable. Through time-tested strategies and approaches, consultants help businesses optimize their cloud utilization and maximize profitability.
