There is no question cloud computing has reduced costs for enterprise IT, with the obvious savings in eliminating complex, expensive and nearly unmanageable on-premise or hosted physical infrastructure.

What has come as a surprise to many IT teams, especially over time, is that cloud storage and processing may be more expensive than originally envisioned, given often unpredictable spikes and “unanticipated” costs which can only be addressed with the right information, expertise and tools.

Here are five recommendations for IT leaders who are starting to plan for 2020, while still being responsible to reign in costs in the near term.

Audit Your True Cloud Costs

While choosing cloud services in favor of on-site or off-site infrastructure may have made sense before, it’s important to calculate your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) accurately. This includes auditing and analyzing all uses cloud services across the organization.

Understand the Costs of All Elements

Cloud spend relies on the pricing models of your service providers, costs associated with cloud connectivity, security, capacity, and scale as cloud applications grow in popularity. With increased adoption of big data analytics and innovations in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and closed loop systems including IoT applications, a “miss” on any of these and other elements is a recipe for failure.

Identify Waste

You cannot manage what you cannot measure, so the next step after getting a firm grasp on cloud resources, related connectivity and security is optimization. Only when you can forecast properly based on consumption trends and new application on the technology and product roadmap, can you then go back to service providers and vendors to renegotiate terms including tiered cloud pricing, network access and capacity offerings with more flexible opex pricing.

Manage Peak Time Usage

It is possible to move workloads around – time of day, frequency, and more – to save costs on more extensive deployments. For example, instead of continually polling for data for an IoT use case, you can poll during non-peak times depending on the mission critical nature of the solutions. You can also poll less frequently.

Develop and Manage with Solid Policies

Given the importance of innovation, developers are being funded to build competitive applications and services and are leaning on devops teams to support their requirements for connectivity, storage and compute across the lifecycle – from POCs to testing to phased roll-outs and finally to production. Smart policies inform decisions that relate to cost optimization and help ensure all employees are accountable for cloud and connectivity costs.

The raazor team is ready to engage and discuss how our experts can help your IT and ops teams get maximum value of technology investments – controlling costs while supporting digital transformation and development initiatives.

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