Between 2015 and 2020, revenue across AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud has quintupled, with more than 90 percent of enterprises reported using cloud technology in some way.

Cloud adoption is accelerating at pace, with Covid pushing this adoption

Consumption-based IT is an efficient option for companies that want to reduce capital expenditures and align IT spending with business initiatives. Businesses pay only for the IT resources they use and can expand or shrink costs based on their needs.
However, enterprises estimate that around 30 percent of their cloud spend remains wasted. Furthermore, approximately 80 percent of enterprises consider managing cloud spend a challenge.
Optimising spend is the number one priority of cloud consumers.

2021 Flexera state of the cloud report, flexera.com.

The dynamic nature of the Cloud itself can result in unanticipated growth, and the cost of the services themselves remains underestimated when setting a Cloud budget. Having a clearly defined Cloud strategy will help here, but good reporting and analytics showing who’s consuming what and where is paramount to managing your Cloud consumption costs.

Some areas to focus on when looking to manage Cloud consumption costs include:

Turn off workloads

Sounds impossible, right? But for services that aren’t required to run 24/7, why not? This can result in considerable savings over time. The key is to using management tools to automate this rather than relying on manual means.

Rightsize Instance Size / types

Granular visibility and forecasting are needed to optimise the consumption of the cloud. Cloud rightsizing is a challenge, but costs can remain exacerbated by the pre-defined instance sizes provided by many Hyperscalers, resulting in users over-provisioning resources to the next level to meet the requirement and additional cost for unnecessary resources. Look for Cloud services that provide more granular levels of consumption, ensuring you pay only for what you need and have the flexibility to scale down as well as scale-up.

Maximise use of discount structures

Many consumers don’t take advantage of long-term commitment incentives that offer cheaper cloud consumption. In a survey of some 750 businesses, just over half (52 percent) of AWS users leveraged reserved instances, and only 46 percent of Azure users did so.

Manage inactive storage

Deleting retired workloads doesn’t necessarily mean that the associated storage is automatically deleted – in many cases, volumes will remain unless set to delete when created. This retains both the original volume and any associated snapshots, thereby resulting in a monthly storage cost for data that is no longer required. Of course, it isn’t always easy to identify these ‘orphaned’ volumes after the workload deletion, which is where tagging comes in…

Manage Tags

Tags are your friends, and a careful and considered approach to tagging from the outset will help you identify workloads and associated services, making it easier to make decisions down the line as to which services are redundant and no longer required. They also help you apportion costs to different parts of the business, giving you better insight into where the money is going. Think about tagging by application, department, service, etc – to better target cost reduction.

Consumption isn’t a Cloud-only solution. Many hardware vendors are now offering on-prem consumption model solutions that mean you only pay for the resource you use. The principal benefits of this are: no initial capital outlay, no infrastructure refresh costs, and capacity growth on demand, with the vendor monitoring usage, and, providing in-place upgrades to the existing infrastructure as your usage grows. These solutions can also benefit from Cloud consumption, providing a hybrid platform that offers the best of both on-prem and cloud provisioning, all wrapped up in a pay as you go, consumption model.

A customer has access to a dashboard of analytics showing how much capacity is being consumed and in real-time. The IT provider and the customer meet regularly to ensure capacity remains optimised for the business, so the provider knows if there are any potential periods of high demand on the horizon, such as the launch of a new product or a marketing campaign.

CiCloud for IaaS

Here at Centerprise, with our CiCloud offering, we have partnered with HPE for Servers, Storage, and networking under HPE Greenlake. We collaborate with CloudSigma for public cloud secure multi-tenant provisioning for IaaS and PaaS and the Ark Data Centre for secure and high energy efficiency hosting for our CiCloud implementation. This offers truly transparent and granular workload provisioning, ensuring you will only ever pay for what you need.

We provide high performance, flexible, public cloud IaaS, Backup aaS, Disaster Recovery aaS, PaaS – all supported by Centerprise Consulting IT services for managed cloud capabilities.

Contact us now

More blog posts on other aspects of CiCloud soon. Don’t hesitate to contact us for a free consultation.