The Incredible Cloud Savings You're Missing Out On

Adekunle Oludele
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1.3K Views
Nov 03, 2022

No doubt, cloud technology has eliminated the cost of storage hardware to a great extent. Almost 39% of the companies have moved to cloud-based storage. They are investing in cloud technology to streamline their workflow.

However, not every company is getting the most out of the cloud. Many companies are still struggling to acquire cloud cost optimization because of poor resource utilization, unidentified software requirements, and miscommunication.

So, even if you migrate to the cloud but don’t optimize its services, your business will not increase savings on technology.

That could be poor cloud resource utilization, miscommunication, or unidentified software needs. So, your shifting to the cloud from traditional storage didn’t do any good to your business.

There is tremendous potential in cloud cost savings and the benefits it brings to your company. Recognizing and deploying this would help scale your business to new heights.

What is Cloud Cost Management?

It’s a process of identifying how you can reduce cloud-based expenditures by using a cloud cost manager. That feature comes along with the cloud service you subscribe to.

For example, the Google Cloud Cost Manager will help you manage costs and suggest a cloud-based strategy.

Similarly, using the AWS cost manager, you can manage your costs in Amazon Web Services (AWS). This process is also known as cloud cost optimization, and it’s essential for every business that has shifted to cloud technology.

When you go for a cloud service, you buy only the required services, like:

Software quality assurance
Business development
Multi-platform testing

Therefore, you must document your requirements and invest in a cloud service. So, let’s look at the advantages you get from cloud cost savings.

Benefits of Cloud Cost Savings

There are numerous business advantages to optimizing cloud costs. However, regardless of what cloud service you opt for, your business gets the following benefits:

Functional Automation

The first and biggest advantage is that the majority of your IT department becomes automated as you shift to the cloud. The vendor is now responsible for providing virtual IT services like:

Processing
Maintenance
Storage
Sharing

When the cloud automates your business functions, you can reduce your team size and eventually reduce costs. For example, cloud storage is virtual and doesn’t need your workers to maintain or repair it.

If any error occurs on the server, the vendor will take care of that. Therefore, you can keep your focus on key business activities and let the vendor fix the issues with the cloud storage.

The cloud cost manager will show you how to save money by automating various departments. However, some key functions can’t go virtual because of business criticality and data security.

Since cloud technology is decentralized, all the data that you store on the cloud becomes available on virtual platforms. Unfortunately, that makes your data in the cloud vulnerable. Therefore, always opt for a certified high-security cloud service to ensure data confidentiality and integrity.

Cloud Monitoring

Another benefit of cloud cost savings is that you can monitor cloud activities. That will help you identify resource utilization and, eventually, manage cloud resources.

Many cloud services use four-corner metrics for cloud resource management. That includes:

CPU
Disk
Memory
Network

Your company’s IT manager will inform you of your business's exact requirements. Once you understand the requirements document, check the portfolio of the cloud service you want to go with. You will find different packages with different specifications.

When you get the virtual services, you will get access to monitor and control cloud activities. That will keep the cloud resources managed, and as a result, you will save on cloud costs.

Different Storage Types

Do you know that almost 80% of businesses use AWS cloud solutions? According to AWS cost optimization, there are three cloud storage types:

Object Storage

This cloud storage is for cluttered data files like PDFs, images, videos, and audio. It’s a challenge to organize and store these files without increasing the cost. But the file storage keeps that data and uses the metadata strategy to retrieve it.

So, you can choose AWS object storage if your business generates a huge amount of unstructured data.

File Storage

The file storage stores data in a hierarchical structure. When you input unstructured files to this cloud storage, it processes them and creates a hierarchy using file-level protocols.

Block Storage

Enterprise applications like ERP need dedicated storage for quick data retrieval. The block storage saves data in blocks and assigns each block an identity.

Therefore, according to your business requirements, you can go for any of the above AWS cloud storage types.

Track Software License Fees

IT businesses buy multiple licenses of software according to their own and their clients' needs. As the software is licensed, it is important to renew each license before it expires.

The license fees are the operational costs that companies usually leave untracked.

As a result, the same fees get multiplied when you try to track them manually. However, you can easily avoid huge operational costs by cloud cost optimization.

For example, you use software X for commercial purposes and software Y for in-house development. Since the marketing and development teams barely communicate with each other, you will never know what resources are idle.

You can identify unused software in all IT departments using cloud cost savings. After that, it’s your choice to either:

End the license; or
Keep that software for business extension

Cloud Cost Awareness

Cloud technology might be new for many businesses because not every business owner easily adapts to change. That’s one reason why many businesses struggle to sustain themselves in the market.

However, you can spread cloud cost awareness in your company by optimizing cloud costs. But, of course, that’s only possible when you communicate with your employees.

When you switch from tangible hardware to virtual operations, your employees might think you have saved thousands of dollars. But that’s not true until you tell them what cloud cost savings are.

You can organize seminars on cloud technology and its costs to educate your team. You can also train the employees on how to efficiently use cloud technology. That might include:

Parallel software development
Resource sharing
Collaboration

You will start observing the change in your work culture once you spread awareness about cloud cost savings and its benefits.

Key Takeaways

You must map your business activities and align them with your software requirements. Only then cloud cost optimization can rightsize your company’s workforce.

Although cloud cost savings help you manage resources, you must establish discipline in your work environment. After that, you can reduce cloud bills and make the best of this technology.