What is Cloud Cost Reduction?
Cloud cost reduction is the process by which a company lowers its monthly cloud bill. Of the many costs facing businesses today, managing the ongoing costs of being on the cloud may be the most challenging to understand and reduce.
For newer businesses and startups who tend to be cloud native, managing computing assets on the cloud is nothing new. Cloud service providers such as AWS, GCP and Microsoft Azure offer access to the cloud via a service agreement, which lowers the upfront capital investment for newer companies to enter the market. You gain access to the cloud over the internet.
For more established and older companies with legacy on-premises data centers and computing systems, migrating to the cloud was already a challenge. Once on the cloud, these companies soon realized the ease with which you can spin up cloud computing resources to meet the evolving needs of the businesses. On the cloud however, every byte counts. As you expand the footprint of your cloud infrastructure, you may be surprised by your growing cloud bill as well.
Unexpected cloud bills at the end of the month will continue to eat away at your bottom line. There are several cloud cost optimization best practices you can use to better manage your cloud resources, in the hopes of lowering your cloud bill.
If you have idle cloud resources that you rarely or never use, identifying and eliminating them will help lower your cloud bill. You can also right size your cloud infrastructure by only provisioning the virtual machines and cloud computing instances that you actually need. Knowing your future cloud computing needs can also help you to save by reserving instances ahead of time. Cloud service providers typically offer discounts for paying for these instances upfront. Even after implementing these cloud cost optimization techniques, you may find that your cloud bill is still out of control.
You could consider using a cloud cost management company. However, these companies only tell you where you’re overspending, but may not have a concrete solution to actually lower your cloud bill.
With Silk, your organization can continue to enjoy the enormous benefits of scalability and flexibility of the cloud, without blowing through your cloud bill every month. The Silk Cloud DB Virtualization Platform decouples your underlying cloud infrastructure from your data and applications. You no longer have to overprovision resources to get the storage capacity and/or performance that you were used to when on-premises. With Silk, you get to enjoy the features of both worlds, all while reducing your cloud spend.
Silk offers rich, enterprise data services such as zero-footprint snapshots, data reduction, deduplication, and thin provisioning. These features are not available in native cloud alone. Silk’s data services help to minimize the amount of cloud resources you ultimately need, which in turn, helps to reduce your cloud costs.
With Silk, you can migrate your applications to the cloud, without the need to refactor – or rewrite – the underlying code. You can do all this at a price that won’t blow your budget. If your ultimate goal is to refactor, you can lift and shift today to start taking advantage of all the cloud has to offer, while working to refactor for tomorrow. Silk makes it ideal for large, complex, and mission-critical workloads such as Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server.
Managing your computing and database assets on the cloud is a breeze with Silk. You can see every detail about your cloud infrastructure in-depth and in real time using Silk’s intuitive Flex Dashboard. Idle cloud resources adding to your cloud bill? Use Silk Flex to scale up or scale down your cloud resources instantly using a simple drag and drop. Silk goes a step further and monitors and manages the performance of all your cloud resources as well.
Silk is cloud-agnostic. This means you can avoid vendor lock-in and experience unparalleled flexibility to switch vendors. With Silk, you have the ability to move your applications between clouds without the need to refactor, regardless of their underlying operating system. With Silk, all your data can be moved to any of the major public and private clouds. In this way, you won’t get locked in with a specific vendor and subjected to their product roadmap and pricing increases.
Cloud Cost Reduction FAQs
What is cost reduction in cloud computing?
Cost reduction is the process by which a company lowers the cost of managing its computing and database assets in the cloud. There are many ways to optimize your costs on the cloud such as identifying and eliminating unused or idle cloud resources, only spinning up cloud resources when you need them, and reserving instances ahead of time for significant discounts. Silk decouples your data and applications from your underlying cloud infrastructure and uses enterprise data services not available in cloud native alone. The platform works to minimize the amount of cloud resources that your organization needs, which in turn, reduces your cloud costs.
What are the benefits of implementing an ongoing cloud cost reduction strategy?
You should not think of lowering your cloud costs as a one-time event. Rather, reducing cloud costs should be an integral part of your overall business development plan. Cloud cost reduction not only lowers your cloud bill at the end of the month. An ongoing cloud cost reduction strategy makes your cloud infrastructure more efficient over time. A more efficient cloud computing system is better able to withstand rapid shifts in the market. Remember when everything went online in 2020? A flexible cloud computing system allows your business to effectively shoulder spikes in customer traffic during peak seasons. With ongoing monitoring, you now know exactly where your cloud resources are being utilized. Therefore, you can quickly turn off cloud resources that you no longer need once the peak shopping season is over. Your cloud bill doesn’t have to be a surprise every month. Work with Silk today to learn more about how we can reduce your cloud spend by 30%.
