Are You Properly Managing Your Cloud Services?

Today, cloud services can be used for about every facet of business. In fact, your business probably uses the cloud for some very important parts of your business. With so many options to choose from, business owners often develop a cloud strategy that includes software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and many more options. 

Most cloud vendors will propose that an organization’s IT is too expensive for what they would get out of it and that by using cloud services a business can cut down on its hardware and management costs. For the most part, this is true. Cloud services can bring flexibility and capital cost reduction, but it can also bring substantial waste if your cloud-based resources aren’t managed effectively. 

We don’t want to give the impression that cloud services aren’t useful, they undoubtedly are, but you may be surprised to learn how much money is wasted by small and medium-sized businesses in the cloud. By routinely playing for recurring web service accounts may not seem like a big deal on the surface, but it only takes a couple accounts per month to add up to hundreds and thousands of dollars a year. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Many organizations that use hosted environments for development or deploy virtual machines for application distribution may initially find cost savings by moving to the cloud, but over time, see those savings dilapidated as larger-than-needed VMs are left running and other computing platforms chew up resources that are billed per CPU hour or per gigabyte. 

So how do you go about creating a strategy that will give your staff the resources they need, while also not having to waste money on unused cloud resources? Here are a couple tips:

• Track all online service licenses and correlate them with the number of employees that need that software to complete their jobs.
• Have a system in place where employees can find solutions to help them, while providing you the ability to block this Shadow IT software if it poses any threat.
• Clean up old volumes, snapshots, and machine images. 
• When you turn on resources in non-production environments, make sure to set it to the minimum size requirements. 
• Use the Reserved Instances option for any production resources and manage them closely. You could save up to 75 percent off your cloud investments. 

Use these five tips to control your cloud computing costs. Tracking your cloud services and eliminating any redundancies or unused resources will go a long way toward reducing your overall computing costs. For more information call k_Street Consulting, LLC today at (202) 640-2737.