Over the past few years, most businesses are moving to cloud for its cost-saving capabilities, speed to value, agility and scalability. The pay-as-you-go model on cloud is a lucrative offering that draws attention from millions of businesses. The key selling point of public cloud adoption is the ability to move from high up-front investments (CAPEX) to distributed operating expense (OPEX) model.
It is however clear that moving to the public cloud alone is not enough to deliver the promised cost-effectiveness. Enterprises need careful planning and strategy to address the hidden costs of cloud adoption, such as egress fees, vendor lock-in, and overspending on nonessential resources and bandwidth.
Cloud providers enable effortless transitioning from on-prem to cloud for all their cloud solution seekers but it has been observed that these enterprises are often unable to manage their utilization and spends. Managing resources to optimize cost, usage, and performances has always been a huge challenge. As a result, they end up paying more than they should, for decisions made at their own discretion.
In this blog, we will dig deeper into the most common hidden costs of cloud computing and how we can evade or control the same.
Let us look at a few hidden costs –
Under-optimized costs
Leading cloud providers offer cloud services with different purchasing options to suit a variety of businesses. Organizations that cannot find pricing options and service packages that best fit their specific use cases, budgets, and business needs may not choose the most economically viable option. Accurately evaluating what best fits your specific business needs and offer the opportunity to achieve cost savings for your business is critical.
Inefficient Provisioning
Spinning too many unused server instances lead to escalated hidden costs. Under-provisioning can also create unnecessary costs such as poor application performance and unexpected overruns, jeopardizing your overall budget strategy.
Unused Resources
One of the advantages of cloud computing is autoscaling. Access to resources depends on your needs. However, irregular auditing, poor communication between users and lack of automated de-provisioning proves expensive and rises cloud bills. For instance, scheduled autoscaling can be set to reduce resources when not in use, however some users run background applications throughout, diminishing the required performance and efficiency.
Here are some tips to avoid hidden cloud costs:
Choose the Right Cloud Computing Plan
Select a plan that scales easily in case of your needs changing constantly. This helps prevent enterprises from under- or over-provisioning of resources.
Reduplicate Data
Deduplication is the process of eliminating redundant data, thereby reducing the size of the dataset. Deduplication with cloud storage reduces storage requirements as well as the amount of data transferred over the network, resulting in accelerated and more efficient data protected operations. When it comes to data governance, vast amount of data can be protected and used for real-time insights. Deduplication can be classified further based on the deduplication location, such as client-side or source-side deduplication.
Automated Cloud Process
It is important to power up servers only when needed and shut them down when there are no jobs to run. This approach limits the number of billable hours. By creating automated workflow scripts for all administrative and operational tasks, users save time and money. The use of automated scripts also helps ensure the company’s profitability by preventing costly human errors that may occur in the process.
Minimize Idle Time
Idle cloud resources add to cloud costs significantly. A lot of resources are wasted when the cloud infrastructure is simply kept unused. Idle time can be minimized by prioritizing jobs and matching them to the right time slots. Directed acyclic graph (DAG) scheduling algorithms can be used to minimize job execution time. DAGs are available on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud platforms. The platform requires task scheduling and resource provisioning to work together for an optimal solution.
Conclusion
Hidden cloud costs are common and often overlooked by most of the businesses unknowingly. All you need is the right strategy, planning, and ongoing monitoring to get most out of cloud without compromising on the areas of potential savings that help in controlling majority of your cloud costs. Right governance enables enterprises to gain greater transparency and control over their cloud usage, costs, and ROI by leveraging highly effective cloud governance tools from leading cloud providers.
At CloudEnsure, we help identify several grey areas in the cloud ecosystem that could lead to increased costs and provide recommendations to strategically evaluate and mitigate the loopholes. Connect with our experts to gain visibility and control over your cloud spends.