As your cloud infrastructure grows and becomes more complex, it's often harder to identify effective cost management opportunities. Often, internal enterprise IT teams will lack the time, tools, and resources to undertake their own cloud audit and optimize inefficient workloads themselves.
An independent cloud audit provides an impartial look into your cloud estate, and can help save money, streamline your processes, and ensure that you're only paying for the resources you use.
With this in mind, here are three cost saving opportunities you can gain from a cloud expense audit.
How a Cloud Audit Provides Cost Savings
1. Eliminates Idle Resources
Without the means to effectively manage idle cloud resources, it can be easy to lose track of the capacity that's paid for, but remains unused. This can be costly, both financially and in wasted capacity, which is set to exceed $17.6 Billion in 2020 alone.
You can mitigate this by undergoing a cloud expense audit. An audit will identify any underutilised resources and provide you with ample suggestions for effective cloud cost optimization. This will ensure that your cloud infrastructure is operating at maximum efficiency and all IaaS and PaaS costs are kept as low as possible.
With better visibility over your cloud infrastructure, you'll have the insight needed to minimize cloud waste and optimize your expenses, freeing up resources and budget to be used elsewhere, such as other IT projects.
2. Rightsizing
Rightsizing provides performance and cost-based recommendations that identify areas of waste and inefficiency across your entire cloud environment based on workloads.
Undergoing a cloud expense audit will ensure resource demand is always kept in line with ideal resource supply. It will actively identify idle periods and underutilized resources and automatically spin down when they aren't needed. If a specific resource can operate on an instance with a smaller footprint without impacting performance it will reduce running costs, eliminate waste, and optimize capacity.
With continued usage monitoring you can be sure that your organization is using the right amount of cloud resource, for the best performance at the lowest usage cost.
3. Optimizes Purchasing Opportunities
Investing in cloud services is a big, often costly decision. Without adequate oversight, you risk investing too much into the wrong vendor and services, which can lead to you overpaying on computing power or being unable to make adjustments without incurring high costs.
A cloud audit can help determine an optimum purchasing strategy and identify cost savings across the purchasing cycle. An audit will also help your business through better reserved instance and usage plan purchasing.
Instead of over-paying for unnecessary resources, you can spot purchase for exactly what you need. This will reduce the hourly rate considerably, when compared with on-demand prices, saving you crucial budget across your cloud infrastructure.
Reduce Your Cloud Budget & Reduce Costs
With the demand for cloud resources on the rise, it's more important than ever for businesses to manage costs.
With a comprehensive cloud-audit, it's easy to manage your cloud infrastructure, reduce costs, and streamline essential processes, ensuring none of your resources go to waste.
