EDITOR ’ S QUESTION
HOW CAN ORGANIZATIONS REIN IN THE TOTAL COST OF THEIR CLOUD OPERATIONS ?
For most businesses the cost of running their cloud operations can be prohibitively expensive . Unsurprisingly , most organizations are looking for options to reduce what can become an overbearing cost .
Organizations should automate routine tasks , such as resource provisioning , deployment and monitoring to reduce manual labor costs and improve operational efficiency .
Some businesses may find that they have prohibitive cloud costs due to the fact they over-provision cloud resources , such as storage and compute . Unfortunately , this can lead to wastage and the inevitable higher costs .
Organizations can ‘ right-size ’ their cloud resources , such as CPU , storage and memory , to better match their usage needs and avoid over-provisioning . It ’ s also worth remembering that data transfer costs between cloud services and on-premise infrastructure can add up quickly and significantly impact the overall cloud costs .
Organizations should analyze their cloud usage and identify opportunities to optimize their usage patterns to reduce costs .
A lack of automation can also prove to be costly . Manual labor costs can add up quickly , particularly if an organization is not using automation to manage routine tasks such as provisioning and monitoring .
Organizations should automate routine tasks , such as resource provisioning , deployment and monitoring to reduce manual labor costs and improve operational efficiency .
You don ’ t have to be a tech expert to know that cloud environments can be overwhelmingly complex , with multiple services and configurations to manage , which can add to the cost of cloud operations .
Finally , and by no means least , the dreaded vendor lock-in needs to be mentioned . Some cloud providers may charge higher prices for their services or make it difficult to move workloads to another cloud provider , leading to higher costs for enterprises that are locked into a particular provider . When possible , organizations can explore different cloud pricing models , such as reserved instances and spot instances , to reduce costs and get the most value out of their cloud investment .
It ’ s also safe to say that enterprises may not optimize their cloud workloads , leading to inefficient resource utilization and higher costs .
We asked three industry experts how organizations can reduce the total cost of their cloud operations . Here ’ s what they had to say .
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