Did you know that over 90% of all organizations used public cloud services in 2020 and spent more than $50 billion in the process? Well, cloud computing has gone mainstream and nearly all organizations are following its trend. Its spending is also expected to rise significantly year after the other.
Now, let’s understand why cloud computing is so important. One of the biggest reasons why companies are making a move towards cloud adoption is to save money.
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These companies intend to lower their operational costs by shifting a part or all of their IT infrastructure and applications to the cloud. But, if they don’t use the cloud correctly, they’re likely to lose money. And, most often than not, businesses rush into migrating their platforms into the cloud. This again has the possibility to yield negative results, i.e, cloud waste.
What is Cloud Waste?
The expenditure incurred on the cloud computing resources deployed by an organisation is called cloud spend. And when enterprises tend to purchase resources for maximum computing load rather than actual computing load, the difference between the two is called ‘cloud waste‘.
How to Reduce Cloud Waste?
In order to avoid costly mistakes, here are some ways in which you can save your money by reducing cloud waste:
Capacity Estimation – Organizations need to estimate their user requirements more accurately. Adding capacity gradually rather than bulk buying resources is more favourable for both the growing business and the cloud environment that is purchased. For this, a realistic approach is key.
Auditing of Resources – Utilize the dashboard that comes with your cloud platform to its full capacity. You can track down idle/unused resources with ease and can save a lot in terms of cloud spending. Keeping track of purchased capacity is the next step after estimation.
Spin Down Resources – monitor unused CPU time and storage usage. Proactive monitoring will allow you to cut down on development environments that are no longer in use.
Auto-Scaling – Get your capacity automatically allocated and released during workload fluctuations. For those that have large workloads on a regular basis, it is healthy to maintain multiple environments so that you can auto-scale only those which cater to services with fluctuating workloads.
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Another aspect of cloud computing that is getting more attention these days is its negative effect on the environment. Although most people don’t realize it, the cloud industry is one of the biggest environmental challenges and one of the most overlooked contributors to climate change. Data centers currently represent roughly 3% of the world’s total energy consumption and they emit nearly 100 million metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year.
How to Reduce Cloud Waste?
Once again, the question remains the same. But, to bring positive changes to our environment, here are 10 steps all organizations must follow in order to cut down cloud waste:
1. Define the Problem
2. Educate, Communicate, and Equip
3. Build a Cloud Efficiency Culture
4. Conduct an Assessment
5. Set Realistic Goals and Communicate Them
6. Initiate Actions and Get Specific
7. Stay Focused and Be Responsive and Efficient
8. Track and Measure Progress
9. Don’t Lose Sight of the Movement Ecosystem
10. Recognize and Reward Success
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