Public cloud spending: Price increases and your IT budget

With?increased prices for public cloud – and?Microsoft cloud-related products?in particular – taking effect lately, many organisations are closely examining what measures they can take towards optimising their public cloud spending.

We’ve asked three of Proact’s public cloud experts about what businesses can do to face these challenges whilst continuing to get the most out of their investment(s).

Weighing in are:

Kevin Janssen, CTO, Proact Netherlands

Marcel Meurer, Division Manager Professional IT Services, Sepago GmbH

Marcel Gjaltema, Manager Presales & Consultancy, Proact Netherlands

1. How can organisations?get control of public cloud spending?

Kevin Janssen:

To control public cloud spending, organisations can implement strategies such as:

• correctly sizing resources
• monitoring usage
• optimising storage
• automating processes
• leveraging reserved instances

An external partner can provide valuable support in controlling cloud spend by offering expertise, tools and ongoing support. A partner can assist customers in optimising their cloud environments. This includes implementing cost-saving strategies and monitoring usage and spend — ultimately reducing the time and effort required for customers to manage their cloud environments effectively. By working with a partner like Proact, who is familiar with the public cloud landscape, businesses can ensure that they are getting the most out of their cloud investment while keeping costs under control.

Marcel Meurer:?

Costs in the public cloud can be optimised by making optimum use of the paid resources. Today, on-premises servers tend to be run with a CPU utilisation of 40%, whereas in the cloud, it makes more sense to run with 80% CPU load while the compute costs are independent of the CPU utilisation. And customers want to get more of what they already paid for.

At the same time, the cloud offers a high degree of flexibility, which can be used to optimise resources and costs: If I operate servers in the cloud with a high CPU utilisation and need more at specific times, additional resources can be rolled out and removed again automatically.

However, the greatest benefit lies in the use of platform services, such as SQL as a Service. If it is possible to replace an SQL server with an SQL platform service, the costs are usually reduced. In addition, the operational effort is significantly reduced as well: An SQL platform service is easier to operate than a server plus database software with all the associated challenges regarding patching, updating, backup, scaling and more.

Proact supports our customers on their cloud journey. Together, we develop the ideal strategy to operate IT resources in the public cloud in a performant and cost-efficient way. In addition to planning which resources are optimal for specific workloads, we also develop the automation to provision, scale and delete resources as needed.

Did you know? Proact offers Managed Cloud Services for customers running services in the data centre, private cloud and hybrid cloud. With these services, Proact can provisioning the right resources at the right time, automatically optimising costs. Contact us for more information at [email protected]

Marcel Gjaltema:

I’ll keep it brief: Organisations can implement control over spend by using governance models and measures like policies and budgets.

Proact can help implement these measures, and we offer a cost-control service to reduce cost on an assessment basis and regular service basis.

2.?How can businesses incorporate these and future price changes into their IT budget(s), even when they might be unpredictable?

Kevin Janssen:

To incorporate cloud cost changes into IT budgets, customers can:

• establish a usage baseline
• plan for fluctuations
• regularly monitor costs
• use cost optimisation tools
• work with a partner like Proact

All these measures will help ensure that unexpected changes don’t result in budget overruns and enables customers to stay in control of their IT budget.

Marcel Meurer:?

It is important to plan well for the costs of operating infrastructure and services in the public cloud. It can be even more important to pay regular attention to changing prices and also pricing models. Fees do not always go up, and sometimes it makes sense to use other types of resources that are cheaper and just as suitable for the workload under consideration.

The hyperscaler vendors announce price changes. But it is not always easy to match the deployed resources with the announcements. Therefore, it is equally important to actively monitor costs and report deviations – to monitor price adjustments and to identify incorrectly deployed and costly resources in time.

At Proact, we offer our customers continuous monitoring and alerting related to costs. We determine the cost development automatically and daily via interfaces and warn in case of peaks – via mail, teams, or directly into the ticket system.

Marcel Gjaltema:

Again, I’ll stick to the basics: Using things like reserved instances (reservations) and tools like NetApp Spot. Alternatively, considering placing workloads in more predictable platforms like the?Proact Hybrid Cloud.

If your organisation could use support on any of the point covered above, or you’d like to know more about how to optimise your public cloud spending, contact one of our experts at [email protected]