Cloud Optimization – the benefits and best practices - Rahul S Kurkure - Founder & director, colud.in
The trend of businesses
migrating at least some of their key workloads or applications into the public
cloud continues as organizations see several benefits with cloud
migration. The global cloud computing
market size is expected to grow from USD 545.8 billion in 2022 to USD 1,240.9
billion in 2027, according to MarketsandMarkets research firm.
While benefitting greatly from cloud services, organizations however face an ongoing challenge of managing the cost and other related aspects of cloud computing. Gartner predicts through 2024, 60% of infrastructure and operations (I & O) leaders will encounter public cloud cost overruns that negatively impact their on-premises budgets. Yes, this clearly indicates, cloud migration and usage require ongoing monitoring and evaluation unlike the regular annual investment in traditional hardware and software.
Cloud Optimization – need of
the hour
Most IT infrastructure and
Cloud Services teams are constantly faced with the challenge of getting a grip
on where the cloud spending goes and what is driving the cost. It is absolutely critical to choose the
appropriate computing resources and assign them to each application or
workload, as the case may be.
As businesses are looking at
scaling to meet the growing demand, it is equally important to optimize cloud
costs, one of the aspects of the cloud optimization plan. The others include improving team collaboration
and employee productivity, application performance, solution reliability, utilization
of resources, and ensuring the right security measures are in place. These improvements will undoubtedly increase
productivity leading to better business outcomes. Cloud efficiency can be established by
ensuring the best-fit infrastructure in real time for cost, performance, and
compliance with respect to applications and workloads. By reducing the waste in a cloud environment,
there is a significant reduction in costs as well. Proactively preventing
problems in an optimized environment drives better productivity of IT and
DevOps teams as they do focus on their core tasks and not on troubleshooting
problems that otherwise occur. With
cloud optimization tools and analytics, there is an improvement in visibility
into the cloud environment enabling teams to make data-driven decisions which
in turn provides a better perspective of the investments in cloud computing
services.
Building a cloud optimization strategy includes the stages of planning, deployment, design, and monitoring where flexibility is also offered to enable transition between the stages for the teams.
Best practices to be
followed in cloud optimization
The business and IT leaders
must begin the process with the end goal in mind. This will provide the required clarity on
what objectives the cloud optimization initiative has to achieve. Measures should be established to ascertain
success at every phase throughout the different stages. The goal should be revisited regularly to
ensure the plan is diligently followed.
Application requirements should be reviewed which can assist in resizing
the compute resources accordingly as and when needed.
By leveraging automation
tools, manual errors can be minimized when installing and managing cloud
services. Automating the infrastructure
can help in controlling costs too as it can administer the work environment,
and track down what is necessary.
It is important to select
the most appropriate storage services to calculate their costs and for
comparing them with other options.
To control unnecessary
provisioning, create and implement a regulated structure around governance and
responsibility for the teams that are involved.
Ensure all team members have the relevant tools that are in good working
condition and they are following the structure.
Collaborate with all
internal teams to ensure the essential data is collected. This data has to be cleaned and validated for
reliability in data-driven decision-making.
This step is very critical as cloud optimization is a data-driven
exercise.
By investing in reserved
instances (RIs), the organization can establish cost savings, as long-term
financial commitment can be made and significant discounts gained when compared
to on-demand pricing.
Cloud security is another
aspect of the process where highly sensitive business information is protected
as preventing data breaches is key to gaining customer trust and business
revenues. A set of policies, procedures, technologies, and controls for
securing the cloud should be in place to safeguard cloud-based applications and
systems.
Create organization-wide
standards which indicate the available resources and their usage, besides
information on when and why the latter should be used. This can provide clarity on costs, quality,
and performance in the cloud.
It is also critical to
follow the procedure of forecasting cloud costs, predicting future expenditure
of the cloud, based on historical data on spending, and also clearly assessing
future project costs. This also ensures
the teams are adhering to their budgets and they are alerted when there is
excess spending.
The performance of cloud deployments should be evaluated and measured on a regular basis, which can lead to further improvements in the whole exercise. With the review of the usage, redundant applications and services can be removed from the plan.
It is equally important to deploy the team with the technical expertise to execute the cloud optimization process. They should work alongside the business leaders to achieve the optimization goals set in the first place. Many a time partnering with the right external team of experts can be more effective as the latter have the know-how and experience to address challenges in implementing similar projects. This partnership will lead to faster business outcomes and the organization’s success. It is also important to empower a qualified team member to drive the entire cloud optimization process who also has both technical as well as people-management skills.