Companies are spending a lot of money on the cloud. But is it well managed? Various studies have shown that organizations rarely have a complete picture of the real costs of the cloud. A fortiori, when it comes to Multicloud ... A few reflexes and tips, some of them common sense, need to be applied.
All IT analysts are optimistic about the evolution of the cloud market. Gartner expects worldwide spending on IaaS alone to approach $40 billion this year.
But ParkMyCloud has dampened the optimism. Based on this estimate from Gartner, this cloud cost management specialist estimates that companies will waste nearly $14 billion on unnecessary public spending!
ParkMyCloud study
A 2018 study by Nutanix states that 5-10% of cloud services provided go unused in most companies, while 10-20% are underused.
ParkMyCloud's study focuses on two factors that can "plummet" the ROI of a cloud migration. Firstly, inactive resources. Secondly, over-provisioning, or the attitude of taking a semi-trailer to transport a small box!
And this discrepancy between actual costs and spending is likely to increase as companies implement a multi-cloud strategy. A study by 451 Research shows that a significant majority (79%) of organizations work with more than one cloud provider.
On paper, this strategy makes it possible to adapt each offering to each need. It also enables you to support the scalability of your solutions and increase the performance of your information system. In a nutshell, Multicloud enables you to benefit from the best of each cloud environment, whether public or private.
On the other side of the coin, the multiplication of subscriptions, the mix of public, private and hybrid clouds, and the increasing use of SaaS (software as a service) applications are forcing companies to make constant choices. And actual cost is not always the main criterion.
In fact, cost optimization should be one of the top priorities of a Multicloud strategy.
Here are three avenues to explore to achieve this Multicloud objective.
1- Set up a governance structure
The democratization of innovative tools and pressure from cloud providers mean that business users do not notify the IT department when they are using cloud resources.
Gartner has examined IaaS and PaaS budgets in companies using cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure in its detailed report entitled "How To Manage Public Cloud Costs on AWS and Microsoft Azure".
According to this firm, it is essential to start by implementing a fundamental framework. This policy should establish spending expectations and then observe actual cloud spending. This first step will help identify anomalies before they become a nasty surprise.
Then it's a matter of quickly eliminating wasteful cloud resources and taking advantage of vendor discount offers.
Companies can rely on cloud cost management and governance tools to :
- Visibility into those famous under-utilized and unused resources;
- Optimize the efficiency of their daily or regular use.
2- Understanding the fundamentals
If unused resources and over-provisioning are two of the biggest sources of cloud waste, it means that companies aren't paying enough attention to their environment.
Yet many companies are accustomed to over-provisioning to ensure application performance. But this usually means paying for peak usage 24/7. Is this really necessary?
Configuration errors can lead to massive waste and unnecessary expense.
Hence the need to focus on automating application resource management, or to consider calling in outside help.
3- Take a close look at unused resources
It's important to monitor and analyze all resources on a monthly basis and determine the root cause of variations. By taking a close look at non-production instances, there's a good chance that the IT team will discover unnecessary expenditure. After all, resource allocation isn't just about CPU and memory. There's also storage, network, throughput...
Companies can rely on vendor-independent cloud management platforms for SaaS, IaaS and PaaS. Their tools provide visibility across an entire hybrid cloud environment to pinpoint exactly what's working where.
This solution can also identify any contracted services or resources that have not been used for a period defined by you. This option eliminates unused (or under-used) services that may have been purchased outside the IT department, but are still being paid for...
