A cloud audit gives enterprises invaluable insight into their cloud estate. When executed correctly, they can help identify cost savings, eliminate idle resources, and minimize wastage – so operations stay lean and efficient.
It provides a great opportunity for businesses to dig deeper into their cloud infrastructure, figure out the moving parts, and make meaningful improvements to optimize existing workloads.
But how often should you audit your cloud? Is it expensive? And how long will it take to complete?
The Importance of a Cloud Audit
Today's cloud environments are more complex than ever. New applications, services, resources, and infrastructure are added, removed, and changed on a near-constant basis. This can make it easy to lose track of what you own, leading to unnecessary expenditure and wasted resources.
By reviewing and optimizing your cloud environment, you can get better visibility of your assets, spend, and capacity. But aside from simply highlighting rightsizing opportunities and savings, a cloud audit can give you invaluable insight into your cloud environment.
A cloud expense audit will help you identify:
- Shadow IT security risks
- Wasted resources
- All assets, applications, services, and data
- Savings opportunities
When Should You Perform One?
If you manage a large cloud estate, then you should regularly audit your IaaS environment to ensure you're only paying for what you use.
Typically, your initial audit will highlight the most opportunities for savings. However, it's important to continually review your cloud environment when:
- New infrastructure is added
- Your business needs change
- Usage requirements increase or decrease.
For example, after a large cloud migration, an audit is essential to get a better understanding of your new assets and services, so you can manage them more effectively.
How Long Will It Take?
When performed internally, a cloud audit can be an expensive and time-consuming process. Often, internal IT teams lack the experience and strategy to perform an in-depth audit. Outsourcing auditing responsibilities to a cloud expense management provider can cut the time down considerably.
At Cass, we offer a cloud expense audit that takes just 90 days. In a simple three-step process, we offer recommendations to cut down idle resources, rightsize existing services, and determine the best purchasing strategy for the future.
Is It Expensive?
Typically, the expense of an independent cloud audit will be offset by the cost optimizations and savings that it creates.
When performed correctly, enterprises can reduce their cloud spend by up to 60% by following audit recommendations. Plus, with improved visibility over assets, savings can continue through better budget allocation and minimal wastage.
Time for a Cloud Audit?
The demand for cloud resources is always growing, so enterprises need to manage costs.
A cloud audit can provide ongoing cost-optimization insights to continually save on cloud spend. To learn more about our 90-day cloud audit, click here.
