Reducing monthly bills without losing any of the benefits the cloud brings

Cost reduction is frequently highlighted as a primary advantage of cloud adoption, with many business cases focusing particularly on this aspect. However, the cloud is a tool, and the benefits derived depend on its usage. Unlike on-premise IT systems, cloud services must be procured and utilized differently. There are the four core levers that influence cloud costs:

1. Utilization - Optimize cloud spending to match actual needs. Cloud resources can be quickly scaled up or down, preventing capital from being tied up in underutilized IT systems.?

2. Pricing choices - Decisions involve trade-offs between cost reduction and on-demand pricing. For instance, opting for on-demand services at a higher cost versus committing to Reserved Instances for up to a 70% discount. Similarly, choosing a high-powered instance versus saving 50% by selecting a lower-tier instance.

3. Cost-management culture - Foster a sense of ownership regarding costs among team members. In a pay-as-you-go cloud environment, this requires a mix of tools, training, leadership principles, and ideally, budget allocation to the smallest decision-making units.

4. Discounts - Achieve savings by consolidating accounts and leveraging volume discounts.

Beyond these four levers, there are additional strategies to reduce cloud costs. For example, decommissioning assets replaced by the cloud or refactoring applications to use serverless functions instead of instances. You can also optimize storage based on access frequency or reduce database licensing costs with AWS Optimized CPU.

Cloud cost analysis is complex and differs significantly from on-premise IT. Noventiq has developed a free of charge analysis of the your last three monthly bills. The free assessment provides you with a multitude of valuable outcomes:

• ?Cost optimization: thoroughly analyses of your cloud infrastructure and usage patterns identify areas of unnecessary spending. This might include spotting over-provisioned resources, idle instances, or inefficient architectures. We’ll recommend specific actions like rightsizing instances, leveraging reserved instances or savings plans, or using auto-scaling to match capacity with demand.
• Efficiency improvements: identify opportunities for technical optimization. This might include recommendations for using more efficient services, implementing auto-scaling, or leveraging serverless architectures where appropriate. Next to this identify and eliminate unused or forgotten resources that are still incurring costs.
• Forecasting accuracy: By analyzing historical data and current usage trends, we can improve your ability to predict future cloud costs. This includes accounting for factors like seasonal variations, planned projects, and potential growth. Accurate forecasting is crucial for budgeting and capacity planning.

?This free assessment is a one-of and doesn’t provide any guarantees your cost won’t spin out of control the next month. Therefore, we can provide this as a managed service. Supporting you in implementing, maturing, and running your FinOps practice. To ensure the right governance structure, processes, teams, and tools are secured in your own organization

Noventiq is the partner of choice to help you keep your monthly bills under control without losing any of the benefits the cloud brings!