As businesses increasingly embrace cloud-based IT environments, they often encounter the challenge of escalating costs. While the cloud offers scalability, flexibility and potential cost saving, unchecked resource consumption and inefficient management can lead to financial strain. To address this issue, you need effective strategies to manage and optimise your cloud-based IT environments.
This article explores key approaches to mitigate escalating costs and achieve cost-efficient operations.
Analysing Cost Drivers
The first step in managing escalating costs is understanding the factors contributing to them. You should perform a comprehensive analysis of your cloud usage patterns, resource allocation, and configurations. This analysis will enable you to identify areas of overspending, underutilisation, or inefficient architecture. Pinpointing cost drivers is the first step to developing targeted optimisation strategies.
Rightsizing Resources
Rightsizing resources involves matching the allocated resources to the actual needs of the applications and services. Many organisations tend to overprovision resources, resulting in unnecessary costs. By rightsizing, you can optimise your IT environment, eliminating wasted resources and reducing expenses. This approach may involve scaling down instances, adopting auto-scaling mechanisms, or choosing lower-cost alternatives for specific services.
Utilising Cost-Effective Pricing Models
The major cloud service providers offer various pricing models, and so you should evaluate and select the most suitable options for your requirements. Utilising reserved instances, spot instances, or serverless computing can significantly reduce costs. Regularly reviewing pricing options allows you to take advantage of new offerings or changes, ensuring you will benefit from the most cost-effective solutions available.
Related Read: Maximising the Benefits of Managed Cloud IT Environments
Automating Infrastructure Management
Automation plays a crucial role in managing and optimising cloud-based IT environments. By automating provisioning, scaling, and resource management tasks, you can streamline operations and reduce costs associated with manual intervention. Automated systems can monitor and optimise resource allocation, detect, and resolve issues promptly, and prevent unnecessary expenses due to human error or oversight.
Implementing Monitoring and Cost Management Tools
Effective monitoring and cost management tools are vital for gaining insights into resource usage and cost trends. These valuable tools will provide you with a clear understanding of where costs are accumulating and help identify potential areas for savings. By setting up alerts for unexpected spikes in usage or costs, you can take immediate action to control expenditures and optimise resource allocation.
Optimising Data Storage
Storage costs often contribute significantly to escalating cloud expenses. You need to regularly review your data storage strategy to identify opportunities for cost optimisation. This may involve implementing tiered storage options, such as moving infrequently accessed data to lower-cost storage tiers or archiving rarely used data. By adopting efficient data management practices, you can reduce storage costs without compromising accessibility or compliance requirements.
Related Read: Build Your Bespoke Data Centre Environment with Sify
Implementing Cost Allocation and Governance
Establishing cost allocation practices is essential so you can assign cloud costs to specific departments, teams, or projects. This promotes accountability and helps identify areas of excessive spending. Implementing governance mechanisms ensures adherence to cost management policies and compliance with budgetary constraints. By promoting a culture of cost awareness and responsibility, you can optimise your cloud spending.
Continuous Optimisation and Review
Cloud environments evolve over time, and so must you by continuously optimising your IT infrastructure. Regular evaluation of usage patterns, cost trends, and technological advancements is crucial to identify opportunities for further cost optimisation. By staying informed about new features, pricing models, and best practices, you can adapt and refine your strategies to achieve ongoing cost-efficiency.
Related Read: Why is Cloud Optimisation Crucial?
Consider Multi-Cloud or Hybrid Cloud Approaches
Diversifying cloud infrastructure across multiple providers or adopting a hybrid cloud model can offer cost advantages. By leveraging the strengths of different providers and integrating with on-premises resources, you can optimise costs based on specific requirements. Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud approaches provide flexibility, redundancy, and the ability to choose the most cost-effective options for various workloads.
Related Read: 6 Reasons Why Multi-Cloud Automation is Crucial for Your Business
Seek an Expert IT Partner
Managing escalating costs in a cloud-based IT environment can be complex. If you need help, you are not alone. Many organisations cite a lack of internal resources and expertise as a significant challenge they are facing. Having an engagement with an IT partner will allow you to get the necessary support to discover, execute and maintain optimisation strategies. A good IT partner will provide ongoing insights, best practices, and recommendations based on their extensive experience, resources and knowledge.
83% of organisations cited lack of resources/expertise as one of their top cloud challenges.
Conclusion
Effectively managing escalating costs in a cloud-based IT environment requires a proactive and strategic approach. To summarise, the key considerations this article has covered are:
- Analyse cost drivers
- Right size resources
- Utilise cost-effective pricing models
- Automate infrastructure management
- Implement monitoring and cost management tools
- Optimise data storage
- Implement cost allocation and governance practices
- Continuously optimise and review
- Consider multi-cloud or hybrid cloud approaches
- Seek an expert IT partner
By considering these factors, you can achieve cost-efficient operations and maximise the benefits of cloud computing. With proper cost management strategies in place, you can leverage the cloud's scalability and flexibility while keeping expenditures under control.
How Sify Can Help
Sify is ideally placed to help businesses build a sustainable, fully optimised cloud infrastructure that meets long-term business needs.
Sify offers deep expertise in all areas of cloud and IT infrastructure, combined with proven methodologies and frameworks to help analyse, design and optimise cloud environments.
Our proven experience and expertise have delivered for organisations seeking to optimise their cloud infrastructures, including reducing costs and ensuring resources are right sized, accelerating deployment time for new applications, improving alignment between business functions and helping firms integrate new cloud-based technologies such as AI or analytics.
The Key Challenges We Solve
With a heritage in IT Infrastructure, Sify has grown over two decades to provide a one-stop engagement across networks, data centre, cloud, digital and IT services.
Sify enables you to build an IT infrastructure that underpins business profitability, by delivering flexible expertise to fill IT skills gaps, and by deploying, managing, and optimising complex hybrid environments to deliver the right combination of flexibility, security and affordability.
Here are the key challenges our Managed Services can help your organisation solve:
- Optimisation
Future-proof your business by optimising your use of cloud technology 
Resources
Increase responsiveness with access to the right scale and calibre of specialist IT skills as and when you need them
- Cost Savings
Make your IT budget go further by lowering your costs and becoming more efficient 
- Reduce Risk
Control your risks by ensuring the security and resilience of your IT infrastructure
To learn more about how Sify can help you optimise your IT environment, visit our Cloud Optimisation page.
