Gartner research shows that more than 70% of companies have now migrated at least some workloads into the cloud, and in the wake of the pandemic, this trend is likely to continue. Because upfront costs are lower, many find that it makes better economic sense to stay on the cloud than to revert to on-prem solutions.

But…

Costs can still be high – especially ongoing costs

Gartner predicts that through 2024, 60% of the companies may encounter cloud cost overruns that negatively impact their on-premises budgets.

This is especially true when cost breakup is not shared, ie, infrastructure or maintenance costs are excluded from quotations.

Your investment is more than just the upfront costs. To get the full picture, you need to factor in ongoing costs such as maintenance and infrastructure. 

Here are a few ways to keep recurring cloud bills under control.

Right-size

You can “right-size” by reducing idle costs – don’t over-allocate. Empty clusters, environments, and workspaces are some easily missable unallocated costs. Monitor resource allocation. One way to optimize resource utilization and allocation is to understand your memory, network, and storage consumption. Many infrastructure providers default to “always on”;  chances are, you don’t really need this.

Cut the hidden costs

Developers should carefully consider the hidden costs of storage. For instance, when architecting data transfer jobs or data-intensive applications, one can keep I/O to local files until confident they are optimized for the cloud.

Check the data

How much data do you really need? IaaS providers have a number of programs/bands, so estimate the right data volume for your app and choose accordingly. It makes sense to keep highly sensitive data and critical workloads on-prem, but move everything else online.

Maintenance

Working with the same agency for app development and maintenance can help optimize maintenance efforts and costs, as the team already knows the requirements. Consider working with a single hybrid app instead of multiple native apps, this means that maintenance and support are also needed only on a single codebase. Another way to reduce maintenance requirements is by passing the app through a test audience before launch; this minimizes corrective maintenance requirements.

Cloud Migration needs to be swift, secure, scalable, and of course cost-effective in the long term. Being cloud-smart can help you gain a competitive edge in the market today. Contact CloudNow for tailor-made cloud solutions for your enterprise.