Ok so as the saying goes, 75% of all statistics are made up but I would like to think that this one is quite accurate, if not on the low side.
In the 20 plus years I've worked with IT teams what is clear is that statistics like this are plucked from reports to help drive a message, hold the front page here comes another one.
As a technology manager, your responsibility is to understand and help express the true benefits of cloud adoption. It’s for that reason that calculating your cloud infrastructure return on investment (ROI) not only requires focusing on financial gain, but on opportunity gain as well. We call this concept return on opportunity.
61% of cloud practitioners say they do not do a good job managing cloud usage and costs
61% of cloud practitioners say they do not do a good job managing cloud usage and costs, according to a 2021 survey conducted by Dimensional Research. In this post we will talk about how you can reclaim your cloud budget by effective cost monitoring, optimisation, security, compliance & automation.
The messages in this post reflect the ones in a recent post I wrote I talked about a report I read during a boring 0-0 game in the euros where 53% of respondents acknowledged they had failed to realise the true value from their cloud investments so far.
Cloud cost monitoring & optimisation
Compared to on-premise infrastructure (except HPE GreenLake https://www.simoda.co.uk/post/to-cloud-or-not-to-cloud-that-is-the-question ) which is financed by fixed upfront investments, cloud value is exchanged based on everyday consumption. This requires a huge shift in your approach to operational management, where optimising cost becomes just as important to ROI as optimising performance.
Must haves when delivering cloud cost management & optimisation
Cloud spend opimtisation
Generate the largest possible savings with predictive analytics and actionable purchasing recommendations for resources like reserved instances
Resource reblanacing
Receive intelligence on more cost-effective ways to deploy your workloads from
replacing general-purpose instances with alternatives designed for specific use
cases to upgrading to the latest generation of instance or storage type, for better
performance, often with a better price.
Cost best practices
Check against best practices and continuously monitor AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform to identify idle resources, unused instances and VMs, EC2 Reserved Instance mismatches, and more.
Security & compliance
Security breaches can become extremely costly and completely negate your cost-saving efforts. Failure to follow crucial best practices around policy enforcement, monitoring and compliance can wreak havoc on your cloud environment and overall ROI. Continuously monitoring cloud activity and configuration changes can help avoid common cloud pitfalls that lead to burgeoning costs.
Must haves when delivering security & compliance
Lock down roles & permissions
Ability to automate the tracking of IAM and permissions by mapping and grouping all user accesses, centralising control across accounts.
Configuration & changes
Gain visibility into the state of your public cloud and alerts you about critical changes to configurations, resources, and security groups.
Security best practice checks
Access critical pre-built cloud security and compliance best practice checks and customisable alerts stemming from standards, regulations, vendor recommendations.
Automation
The public cloud is dynamic, therefore the actionable strategies discussed above need to be repeated continuously. Maintenance and ongoing management of your public cloud infrastructure can be fulfilled by manually checking each area, but this is time-consuming and can be impacted greatly by human error both costly to any organisation.
To achieve greater return on investment and opportunity, you can lean on automation. When you automate critical tasks across your cloud environment, like reporting and alerts, it becomes easier to maintain agility and innovation at scale.
Summary & key takeaways
When you operate in the public cloud, you want to achieve the potential cost savings that were promised. Yet, to recognise real ROI, enterprises, public sector agencies need to apply cloud strategies that will help them attain optimised usage and performance with minimal overhead.
If you apply the methods and best practices described here, you’ll not only see return on your cloud investment, but also return on opportunity. Cost optimisation, security management, and automation work together to make complete ROI possible, giving you the capacity (and budget) to innovate for the future.
Continuous monitoring and insight is central to reducing waste and optimising spend
Security management can impact cloud ROI just as significantly as cost management
Automation makes it easier to avoid critical errors while maintaining agility
Which of these strategies are you going to implement ?
How will they affect your environment ROI ?
Are you interested in learning more ?
Want to save 30% on your cloud bill ?
Get in touch today and we will start with a free cloud checkup
Free Cloud Check Up
The Cloud Check Up is a detailed assessment of your cloud infrastructure, provided by one of our cloud technical consultants and is designed to pinpoint optimisation opportunities which can help correct over-spending. The free report will also identify security & compliance vulnerabilities and help you plan resources needed to address each one.
Features of cloud checkup
Optimise your costs across cloud platforms & reduce your cloud bill by up to 30%
Analyse historical usage and generate reports to better plan for future projects
Pinpoint wasted resources and highlight re-sizing recommendations GAP analysis report with more than 600 best practice checks to reduce risk
Identify security vulnerabilities & compliance gaps
Compare against 35 different standards including HIPAA, PCI DSS, NIST & More
Monitor, self-heal and ensure compliance
Sign up here CONTACT US | Simoda Technology Solutions
Thanks for reading
Please reach out today to learn more.
Daniel
0114 553 3600