Ten Steps to Reducing Public Cloud Bills: Exploit Cloud Economics

The cloud moves fast—your organization cannot afford to lag behind. Managing and optimizing public cloud services requires proactive tactics, enabled by complete visibility and control.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been curating Gartner’s top ten recommendations for lowering cloud costs, adding our own insight and suggestions for how to implement them. We’ve covered the thoughtful process of selecting your cloud management toolkit, as well as an effective way to leverage consolidated billing and tags to optimize multiple cloud accounts. This week, we focus on the economics of the cloud—turning things off when they aren’t needed.

Recognizing and Avoiding Waste

As Gartner noted in their report, it was common to leave data centers running at all times. However, with an ephemeral cloud environment, significant expenses are quickly racked up in the times when cloud computing capacity simply isn’t necessary. (In fact, nearly 75% of the year is associated with nights, weekends, or holidays.) This underused capacity amounts to thousands of dollars each year.

Also unlike traditional IT, it’s easy for teams across an organization to spin up instances and machines at prolific pace in the cloud; it’s critical that you maintain control. In order to make the most of your cloud investment, you must know what is running at all times to reduce waste and ensure performance.

With a unified view of instances, resources, services, and workloads running across your cloud environment, you can track performance, recognize trends, and eliminate wasted spend. For instance, spotting resources that are under-utilized or misallocated can empower you to correct the issue and drive efficiencies as you scale.

However, with scale comes the challenge of visibility. The CloudCheckr platform offers centralized, fully customizable dashboards to offer at-a-glance information across your cloud infrastructure. Heat maps and inventory reports provide complete visibility, so there are never any surprises.

Turbocharging Your Cloud with Automation

Of course, recognizing issues is only half the problem. Drive agility and operational efficiency by implementing automation tools to help “exploit cloud economics.” As Gartner’s report explains, native cloud tools, like AWS Lambda and CloudWatch, can help support tag-or-terminate policies and start and stop instances with a bit of scripting work.

CloudCheckr empowers organizations to take this a step further, by providing scheduled automation to modify and optimize resources based on user-specified parameters. The platform not only adjusts activity for underutilized resources—it also automatically creates snapshots and backups to set a baseline for future instances. CloudCheckr complements, rather than replaces, the native functionality of cloud providers, to ensure resources are safely and efficiently managed.

Additionally, over 450 built-in Best Practice Checks offer specific suggestions on how to reduce costs, improve security, enforce compliance, and optimize performance. These recommendations are readily available for users to address with the click of a button.

Automating resources can offer significant peace of mind, as well as significant savings. With a comprehensive cloud management tool like CloudCheckr, your organization can scale your cloud with confidence.

Learn more about how automation capabilities can help your organization reduce costs, improve security and compliance, and optimize cloud performance.

Next up: Reducing cloud costs with a right-sizing strategy.