Hybrid Cloud Costs

Hybrid cloud is on the rise, so what kinds of issues are organizations facing? According to RightScale (now Flexera)’s 2019 State of the Cloud report, the top priority this year is cloud cost optimization. That makes sense when you stop to think about it — as cloud use increases, it’s natural that the costs associated are also increasing. Sixty-four percent of all organizations surveyed cited cloud costs as their top concern, but it’s even more so among intermediate and advanced cloud users (70 and 76 percent respectively), who fully understand the cloud and the cost challenges it brings.

Despite all this squawking from organizations, very few have actually implemented policies to address this issue. Want to be in the cool kids club? Here’s what you can do:

1. Shut down unused workloads: You wouldn’t keep the lights on in your house when you’re away, so why keep your cloud servers running when you don’t need them either? If you have non-persistent workloads, turn them off when you don’t need them.
2. Rightsize your instances: Same issue as above. You wouldn’t pick out shirts that are two sizes too big for you “just in case,” right? Why pay for extra resources that you aren’t using right now? Buy them down the road when you need them. It might sound a little scary, but it’s not like cloud resources aren’t easy to buy. (In fact, it’s only all too easy, which is part of the problem.)
3. Take advantage of your cloud provider’s sales: Cloud providers offer discounts. Take advantage. For example, AWS and Azure both offer Reserved Instances, which guarantee the user a certain capacity for a duration of time, usually at least a year. You commit to paying for all of the hours in the term, and in exchange the hourly rate is drastically lowered (up to 75 percent compared to on-demand pricing). If you’ve got dedicated cloud servers that don’t fluctuate in resources, Reserved Instances would be a great solution. But only 47 percent of AWS users take advantage, and the number for Azure users is even lower.

Don’t wait around for the cloud to be optimized, because it’s not going to optimize itself. There’s plenty of different things you can do to make your cloud a lean, mean, optimized machine, so get going already!

If you’re ready to start optimizing your hybrid cloud and controlling costs better, we can help! Otava (formerly Online Tech), a secure, compliant hybrid cloud provider, is great at optimizing cloud costs with SprawlGuard® technology. Get advanced analytics and a deeper look into how and where your cloud is running. For more information visit www.otava.com.