Public cloud adoption is continuing to accelerate as businesses look to reap the benefits of lower costs, maintenance, and near-unlimited scalability. Typically, public cloud providers offer a relatively low (or sometimes non-existent) signup fee and even help migrate your businesses data for no extra cost. From here, you're billed based on the resources you consume.
While this all seems great, it's important to remember that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Unfortunately, hidden costs are a by-product of the public cloud and often lead to unexpected bills. But how does that happen? The cloud budgets were planned, and resources were allocated.
Public cloud providers are notorious for using complicated billing formulas, billing resource consumption differently depending on the time of day, and not treating all activity equally. However, billing complexity isn't the only common challenge when it comes to cloud cost optimisation. Other challenges include lack of visibility, improper provisioning, and poor architecture design.
Lack of Visibility
Managing your public cloud spend can become increasingly challenging. This is particularly true when working across multiple public clouds and hybrid clouds. Over time, the spend visibility becomes complicated, and cost management becomes labour-intensive, exacerbated by the fact that some vendors bury important information deep inside their portals.
Without a dashboard that shows historical and current public cloud usage, wasted cloud spend can easily become a significant line item in your IT budget.
Improper Provisioning
By now, most IT departments know the importance of right-sizing virtual machines to ensure consistent performance and cost-efficiency. However, that is not the end of the story. Within each public cloud, there are multiple ways to reduce costs even further.
Failing to capitalise on these can lead to unforeseen cloud costs and inefficiencies.
Poor Architectural Design
According to the "2020 State of the Cloud" report released by Flexera, businesses see lack of resources/expertise as a top cloud challenge, along with governance, security, and cloud expenditure in general. Poor architecture and design can often lead to underperforming workloads, high cost and unsecured cloud servers and networks.
How can you maximise the value of your cloud and reduce your AWS cloud spend by 30%?
Here at The Missing Link, we provide in-depth knowledge across the public cloud – from planning and designing, to building and optimising workloads. Our free cloud optimisation assessment is designed to help you achieve total visibility cloud management – all in one place – to immediately uncover a cost saving of up to 30%.
With an architectural review, we can help you discover opportunities for optimising your configuration and costs while preserving your cloud environment's availability and performance. We also manage your cloud resources to ensure strong governance and security. By following a simple process, our team will:
- Analyse and investigate the current state of your AWS environment
- Present cost-saving opportunities in a concise report
- Recommend clear and prioritised steps to help you reduce your cloud spend
