Cutting cloud costs and complexity: A 2023 strategy

With the current uncertain economic environment, many leaders are searching for ways to cut costs and redistribute their savings to growth areas. It puts them in a challenging position of simultaneously trying to cut back on spending while positioning their businesses for future growth.

For many leaders, the cloud is a valuable tool for navigating the future climate. In fact, 85% of startups and small-to-medium businesses believe that investing in cloud server costs will help future-proof their businesses. However, 56% of IT tech leaders expect their public cloud spending to increase in 2023.

It doesn’t have to be that way, however. There are critical ways to cut cloud server costs and cloud complexity. With the right cloud cost management tools, many leaders are finding ways to redistribute their funds without sacrificing future growth. Here are some of the most useful ways successful organizations can reduce cloud hidden costs and complexity in 2023.

While most company departments are experiencing cuts, digital investments continue to grow. Gartner found that four out of five CEOs are increasing their investment in digital technology, hoping it will decrease their overall costs associated with the business.

However, many are also disappointed with the results: 59% said their digital initiatives took too long to complete, and 52% said it took too long to realize value.

Leaders setting the cloud strategies need to balance short-term gains with long-term goals to achieve results for their bottom line without hurting the long-term vision. Especially in the beginning, cloud server costs can be intimidating. Cloud infrastructure can be high after migrating to the cloud, affecting business viability.

In addition to costs, cloud complexity can make migration challenging. It is common for organizations that migrate to the cloud quickly. It increases security risks and the potential for cloud failure. Some of the symptoms of cloud complexities include:

• Increasing costs for systems and operations
• Higher operations personnel turnover compared to before implementation
• Slow application addition or removal
• Leadership questions the value of the cloud

Many organizations face the challenges of a complex cloud. In fact, six in 10 CIOs said their teams would become overloaded with increasing complexities across their tech stacks if they didn’t have access to an automated approach.

Leaders need to increase their cloud spend awareness and simplify the cloud to avoid the headaches and challenges of a high-cost, complicated cloud.

Here are some of the main ways to optimize costs for a modern cloud strategy:

From data lakes to repositories for application state, storage is used in a wide range of scenarios in the cloud. As a result, it provides leaders with an important opportunity to reduce spending. However, 60-73% of stored data goes unused, meaning you may be overpaying for data you no longer need to access quickly.

There is no one-size-fits-all when choosing proper storage. It depends on whether you manage a private, public, hybrid, or multi-cloud. Typically, there are three cloud storage options:

• File storage
• Block storage
• Object storage

To optimize your spend, strategically cache storage and leverage storage tiering. When selecting the best option, ensure you choose a performance (or how fast you can access the file) and access (how often you will need the file) tier that meets the needs of your data.

Reducing traffic across regions and zones is another way to optimize cloud costs. Many choose the cloud because it enables self-service. As a result, organizations allow everyone in the company access to their cloud to monitor, deploy, troubleshoot, or provision workloads. While it may be convenient, it often results in unwanted performance hits and other mishaps, which lead to unexpected and unnecessary costs.

To avoid these fees, self-service must be managed and provisioned through infrastructure as code (or IaC). IaC allows organizations to automate built-in best practices and tuned resources without overprovisioning. Restrict cloud access to employees and stakeholders who have cloud management experience and can build a cloud infrastructure that balances both performance and cost.

Analytics and machine learning (ML) are critical for proper cost management. Accessing more reports, charts, and graphs often leads to information overload. Instead, use ML and artificial intelligence (AI) to identify resource usage patterns to find true anomalies and receive alerts to changes that require closer examination.

Automation is critical to ensure your company always adheres to best practices. It can help with overprovisioning costs and scaling automatically by acting based on rules you can set up in advance. It helps reduce delays and the requirement for an overprovision infrastructure.

The way your networks are configured will also impact data transfer costs. Data transfers can increase rapidly with usage depending on how you route network traffic.

You can significantly improve your data transfer costs without impacting available throughput by modifying your network configuration. For example, choosing a private IP address when possible will improve costs over an elastic or public IP address.

Scheduling resource usage reduces unallocated resources and cloud waste, especially in lower environments, such as Sandbox or Development. For most services and applications, usage changes are driven by schedules, processes, or business events that leaders can predict.

Scheduling resource allocation and scaling based on these factors will help ensure that resources are always available and don’t run idle when they’re not needed, driving up costs. For example, organizations can use operations schedulers to manage on-demand sandboxes to help reduce cloud waste.

Complexity is detrimental to your cloud solution. Here are some ways to improve your cloud complexity management:

While utilizing less expensive platforms may be more cost-effective, it can backfire. Instead, invest in unified platforms with business analytics, security, and end-to-end observability to improve simplicity.

While cloud flexibility seems attractive to companies, it can lead to too much complexity, and organizations often struggle with complex multi-cloud environments. Instead, consolidate cloud management tools by staying consistent with one type of cloud, such as private or public.

Examine your workloads, platforms, data, and services. Once you understand your usage, you can create a strategy that controls costs, improves security, and reduces outages.

Automation tools save time and obtain precise answers. It’s important to harness cloud cost management tools such as cloud service brokers (CSBs), service governance, cost governance, cloud management platforms (CMPs), resource governance, multi-platform monitoring, and multi-platform management.

If you’re trying to find ways to optimize your cloud server costs and avoid cloud complexity, you don’t have to do it alone. Grid Dynamics can reduce your cost and increase scalability by migrating data pipelines. We assist in using machine learning and analytics for better cost management to ensure you can gain insights into the environment you’re running with the help of a team of experts.

Contact us today to see how we can help you create a compelling and comprehensive cloud strategy in 2023.