Are you looking for cloud cost optimization strategies for your organization’s multi-cloud deployments? The financial benefits of embracing a multi-cloud deployment are innumerable. But multi-cloud deployments are complex since organizations have to deal with many providers and service terms simultaneously. Without the right cloud optimization strategies, it’s easy to waste money on unused cloud resources without organizations noticing.
Organizations should prioritize cost management in multi-cloud deployments from the word go. While the cloud itself is relatively low-cost, dealing with multiple providers and workloads can be tricky. Luckily, there are practical steps organizations can take to avoid paying unnecessary cloud costs.
Explore All Available Options
Research is a key component of your multi-cloud cost optimization plan. You should evaluate and understand the needs of your organization and the providers that offer the best pricing.
Have a clear picture of the workload demand patterns. This will allow you to arbitrate costs across cloud providers and take advantage of on-demand services effectively. For example, you might find that one provider’s elastic storage is cheaper, while another has cheaper CPU pricing.
It’s also critical to understand the capabilities, such as tools and third-party services, you need to accommodate workloads. Sometimes, it may be more effective to choose a basic infrastructure cloud provider or keep some instances in an existing internal environment.
Map Out Your Strategy
Making plans upfront is necessary if you want to manage multi-cloud costs effectively. Assess all available options and go with the one with a cloud-native architecture that’s most suitable for your organization’s workloads.
Assess your on-premises workloads and migrate all workloads with an associated cost-benefit. Don’t make the mistake of moving workloads to the cloud wholesale. You may even have to retire some workloads instead of sending them into the cloud.
Use Cloud Monitoring
Continuous cloud monitoring is an effective way to ensure you’re using cloud resources optimally. Many organizations inadvertently deploy resources to the cloud only to receive enormous cloud bills.
Cloud monitoring enables organizations to manage resources effectively by ramping them up and down on demand.
Ensure Proper Data Tiering and Classification
The tiering and classification of data are key to multi-cloud cost optimization. Organizations that skip this step risk incurring expensive data transfers when moving data from one platform to another. Ideally, you should segregate data across multi-cloud platforms to serve local systems and applications instead of replicating data across clouds.
Plan Long Term
Multi-cloud cost optimization is a continuous, ongoing activity and not a one-time event. Many organizations make the mistake of assuming that a move to the cloud leads to automatic savings. This is not the case. To realize the cloud’s cost-benefit, organizations must plan and put in some effort to monitor cloud costs over a long time.
The best way to go about it is to align cloud costs to your organization’s key performance indicators.
Don’t Forget Security
It’s easy to forget about security after a move to the cloud. Often, organizations make the mistake of assuming the cloud provider is responsible for the security of their data and stored assets. This can be disastrous in the event of an attack. Breaches can be very costly in terms of lost data and the recovery process. This is why it’s important to take charge of your organization’s cloud security.
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