3 Ways to Reduce your Cloud Costs

Reduce your cloud costs Marie Kondo style! Have you heard of Marie Kondo? She is a tidying consultant who helps families organize their lives by reducing wasted space, material items, and time.

While watching her carefully organize peoples’ closets, I began to draw parallels between this process and cloud management.

Last year alone, idle resources and overprovisioning led to an excess of $14.1 billion in wasted cloud spend!

Enterprises often view the cloud as a major source of cost savings, but without the proper controls in place, savings are by no means a given.

Cloud can be a cost savings center, but organizations need governance and transparency to truly wrangle cloud consumption and rein in unchecked spending.

One of Marie Kondo’s core principles is to ask if something “sparks joy” before deciding whether to keep it.

From my perspective, overspending on cloud, only sparks frustration.

Like the Marie Kondo method, there are three ways to reduce your cloud costs and optimize its capabilities:

Cloud waste is usually a result of overenthusiastic resource deployments — both in terms of the number of resources and their configurations.

Frequently, companies, accustomed to the sunk costs of on-premises IT environments that can’t be recovered, have added a little “wiggle room” in their provisioning.

Often designed to prepare for future demand, this extra cushion can mean companies are paying for unused capacity if the projected demand fails to materialize.

The same psychology (the sunk costs of on-premises IT infrastructures) has led to resources left running when they are not in use.

It is estimated that 44% of workloads are non-production workloads, such as those used in quality assurance, development, testing and staging, with a further 15% of cloud computing costs stemming from duplicated resources that are no longer required.

To address this, companies need to conduct an inventory of every element of their IT infrastructure and monitor it regularly to ensure it is not going to waste.

The next phase of inventorying IT is rightsizing.

With rightsizing, companies must not only identify what has been incorrectly provisioned, but reconfigure those wasted resources to reach optimum levels.

All too often “zombies” — cloud resources that were once useful but have been discontinued, duplicated or no longer required — are subtly bumping up the monthly costs of cloud, without providing any business benefit.

We specialize in ‘tidying up’ cloud by managing cloud costs and providing insight with cloud intelligence.

Managing, tracking and acting on the dynamic changes in cloud costs and services is understandably very complex and in our opinion beyond what we can expect from any human, even Marie Kondo.

By using AI, Kostner is able to analyze the millions of possibilities available, to find the best possible way to run cloud at optimal costs and tailored to specific needs.

Get in touch with Kostner by clicking below and spark joy by making cloud cost management an achievable goal in 2020.

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