Maximising Efficiency: Proven Strategies to Minimise Cloud Waste in Your Practice
Cloud computing has revolutionised the way businesses operate. It offers scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency. However, cloud services also come with a downside:
cloud waste.
Cloud waste is the unnecessary spending of resources and money on cloud services, which often need to be fully utilised or optimised. About 32% of cloud spending is wasted, which can lead to budget concerns as spending skyrockets. But that figure also holds opportunity. It means you can reduce nearly a third of cloud spending by optimising how you use cloud tools. So, how can you minimise cloud waste in your practice and save money? Here are some clever tactics to consider.
🔍Conduct a Comprehensive Cloud Audit🔍
Before implementing any cost-cutting strategies, conduct an audit. It's essential to have a clear understanding of your current cloud usage. Conducting a comprehensive cloud audit allows you to identify the following:
Underutilised resources
Overprovisioned instances
Unnecessary services
Generate reports using cloud management tools and examine usage patterns, costs, and performance metrics. This initial assessment forms the foundation for implementing effective waste reduction tactics.
📐Put in Place Right-Sizing Strategies📐
Right-sizing involves matching cloud resources to the actual demands of your workloads. Many practices fall into the trap of overprovisioning, which means securing more user licenses or features than they need. This leads to increased costs and unnecessary waste.
Analyse your workload requirements and resize instances accordingly. Use tools provided by your cloud service provider to identify and adjust instances' capacity. This ensures that you only pay for the resources you truly need.
💰Use Reserved Instances and Savings Plans💰
Cloud providers offer cost-saving options like Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans. These allow practices to commit to a specific amount of usage. This is in exchange for discounted rates. You can significantly reduce your cloud costs over time by leveraging these options.
Carefully analyse your workload and usage patterns. Then, determine the most cost-effective reserved capacity or savings plan. Find a plan that aligns with your practice's long-term goals.
⚙️Install Automated Scaling Policies⚙️
Dynamic workloads require dynamic resource allocation. Install automated scaling policies to ensure that your infrastructure scales up or down based on demand, optimising performance and preventing overprovisioning during periods of low activity.
Cloud services enable you to set predefined scaling policies. Examples are AWS Auto Scaling and Autoscale in Azure. These features help ensure efficient resource utilisation without manual intervention.
📦Track and Optimise Storage📦
Storage costs can accumulate quickly, especially when data is not regularly reviewed and archived. Estimate your storage needs. Then, lifecycle policies should be implemented to automatically downsize lesser-used data, such as transitioning less frequently accessed data to lower-cost storage options.
Review and delete unnecessary data regularly to free up storage space, basically by adopting a proactive approach to storage management; this can help you significantly reduce the costs associated with data storage.
⏰Schedule Your Cloud Resources⏰
Schedule your cloud resources to run only when you need them. For example, turn off development, testing, or staging environments at night and on weekends, or scale down your production environment during off-peak hours. Use available tools to automate the scheduling of your cloud resources and base this on automated rules and policies that you define.
🗑️Delete Unused or Orphaned Cloud Resources🗑️
Sometimes, you may need to remember to delete cloud resources that you no longer need or use. This can include:
Snapshots
Backups
Volumes
Load balancers
IP addresses
Unused accounts
These resources can accumulate over time and incur unnecessary costs. To avoid this, you should regularly audit your cloud environment and delete unused or orphaned resources your practice is not using. You can often use cloud provider tools to find and remove these.
🌿Weed Out Duplicate Services🌿
Different departments in the same practice may be using duplicate services. Centralise cloud resources and remove identical tools. Everyone using the same cloud tool for the same function can save money and enhance collaboration, reporting, and data integration.
⚡️Embrace Serverless Architecture⚡️
Serverless computing allows practices to run applications without managing the underlying infrastructure. You pay only for the actual compute resources used for your processes. This eliminates the need to provision and maintain servers, reducing operational complexity and costs. Consider migrating suitable workloads to a serverless model. This can help you optimise resource use and cut cloud waste.
💡Schedule a Cloud Optimisation Assessment Today!💡
By following these smart tactics, you can reduce cloud waste in your practice and optimise your cloud spending, saving money while improving operational efficiency and environmental sustainability.
