Strategies for Reducing Cloud Costs

Best Practices for Reducing Cloud Spend

Are you considering migrating your applications to the cloud to simplify your data management? While the public cloud is substantial for minimizing how much time you spend day-to-day managing your data, its costs can quickly spiral out of control if you aren’t careful. There are a few ways to ensure your next bill doesn’t leave you with sticker shock.  

Why Companies Have High Cloud Costs

As cloud adoption continues to increase for companies, so do concerns about maintaining their cloud bills properly. Reducing cloud costs and keeping them under control has become more urgent than before due to the pandemic. To do this properly, starting with the right approach is crucial. Your cloud strategy should prioritize cloud cost control and inspect all features of your cloud services to ensure your company saves on the cloud. To monitor network traffic and track all this information properly, it is best to balance the cost, cloud resources, and potential savings involved with the cloud. The end goal should be to achieve maximum performance with minimal costs.  

Lowering Cloud Spend Should Be a Priority

Lowering cloud costs and controlling them at an enterprise level can be challenging. Having a cloud cost optimization strategy with the right service provider is key to reducing cloud spending. You must have the right tools in place to help monitor cloud spending. Getting clarity into cost savings and properly managing them is very important. Cloud technology allows you to scale as needed. Scaling makes it easier to run and store all your data efficiently on web servers. It may take some time to do it yourself, but with the right tools, it’ll be easy to make it a priority.  

Top Strategies for Reducing Cloud Costs

It is easy for cloud costs to skyrocket due to many different factors. Cloud cost management strategies can help minimize prices and provide many benefits to companies. Identifying mismanaged cloud resources, eliminating waste, and right-sizing services help reduce overall cloud spending. Finding unused resources and removing them is the best way to save money on cloud spending. It is easy to end up with unnecessary cloud storage because of how fast you can provision. Right-sizing your compute resources is another way to help minimize cloud costs. This process analyzes your computing services and helps modify them to their proper size. The ability to scale up or down gives your business an advantage when dealing with cloud computing. It’s hard to figure this out the first time, but once you find a way to reduce idle costs and minimize the amount of space needed, it’ll help lower overall cloud spending. Taking advantage of different cloud services that can manage your cloud storage and keep costs under control on an ongoing basis is beneficial for your business.  

Five Ways to Reduce Your Cloud Spend  

Whether you’re a customer of AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure, here are some ways to rein in cloud costs: 

1. Feel the power of machine learning and proactive monitoring

What is one of the easiest things to do to cut cloud costs? Don’t do anything at all! Taking advantage of policy-based automation and proactive monitoring functionalities on virtual machines can help ensure that your cloud infrastructure is optimized – without ever lifting a finger. 

2. Take advantage of rich data services

Taking advantage of rich data services such as deduplication, data replication, thin provisioning, and zero-footprint clones can offer significant cost reductions on your cloud bill. With these services, you can minimize how much capacity you are using in the cloud which, in turn, minimizes your cloud spending.  

3. Optimize infrastructure by choosing the best cloud data center to suit your needs

Adopting a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy allows you to move data to the infrastructure that meets each application’s needs while at the most cost-efficient price point available. With data mobility between infrastructures, users can easily use cost-saving techniques such as bursting. For example, a retailer might run its workloads on-prem with minimal resources for most of the year but burst into the cloud on Black Friday to meet greater customer demand. 

4. Manage your entire hybrid cloud on one platform

Not having a consolidated view of your complete hybrid or multi-cloud infrastructure can make it difficult to see when you’re closing in on thresholds. Which workloads need to shift to other resources with more capacity. What’s more, you don’t even have a way of making this shift quickly and easily.  

5. Reduce the cost of cloud migration

The process of migrating data to the cloud can be costly. Not only do you need to rearchitect your applications completely to fit in the cloud, but you also are costing your team months of work that is spent better on more high-value projects. Using a cloud database virtualization platform such as Silk, you can move your data to the cloud quickly and easily – no rearchitecting required! 

Priceline’s Story

One company that had to contend with a higher-than-desired cloud bill was Priceline.com. Priceline is an online travel agency that helps consumers save on hotels, flights, rental cars, cruises, and travel packages. In order to keep providing a top-notch customer experience on its website, the Priceline team decided to adopt Google Cloud for its infrastructure. Being on the cloud means they can quickly spin up additional resources and deploy new code faster, without maintaining the overhead of on-premises infrastructure. The only problem was that they needed very fast performance — that they couldn’t seem to achieve natively – and they needed to figure out a way to get it without going over budget.  

Enter Silk. The Silk Cloud DB Virtualization Platform sits between Priceline’s applications and the underlying Google Cloud infrastructure. It separates performance from cloud capacity, making it possible to continuously optimize performance – resulting in significantly faster performance compared to native cloud alone. Silk leverages rich enterprise data services – such as data replication, zero-footprint instantaneous snapshots, and deduplication – that help keep the amount of cloud resources to a minimum so you can stay within budget.  

With Silk, Priceline saw a significant increase in performance. This boost in performance made it possible to cut back on overprovisioning to achieve the desired level of performance their workloads needed – thus helping to keep their cloud budget in check. In fact, the Priceline team was able to reduce their costs by 45% with Silk. 

The cloud can make managing your infrastructure easier. But if you aren’t careful, it can also cost you an arm and a leg. By taking these strategic steps, you can ensure that you never spend over your budget. 

Ready for more ways to reduce the cost of managing your data in the cloud? Download our latest eBook to learn more!