October 25, 2018 // By Magenic
The cloud may not be raining money but it may hold savings for your organization. This is our first in a series of three blog posts intended to give you a road map to the cost-effective cloud. This post will focus on the first stage of Magenic’s AAA approach to improving cloud migration: Assessing your technology portfolio. Part two will discuss taking Action and part three will cover Adjustments.
Let’s start with an obvious question: how much are you spending on the cloud? If you don’t know, find out. Those expenses can add up and it’s important to stay on top of them. Make sure you have a cloud management web portal and reporting tool from your vendor. Make sure you’re seeing real-time data.
But don’t overdo it. Measuring too finely can be counterproductive. Managing your cloud is a marathon and not a sprint, but you still need to move rapidly.
If you have a multi-cloud strategy, have a large cloud presence, or have cloud centers in more than one country, you may need a third-party cost management tool. A good tool can allow you to drill down into cost areas for nuanced analysis. For your IT team, make sure to segregate your business units to track spend in categories. Insist on a naming convention to make resource ownership easy to track.
Here’s a cheat sheet of what you should measure:
- Total cost of an application broken down by deployable unit or components (web site, web server, headless process, database, enterprise queue).
- Storage consumption trends compared to business growth.
- Demand by application system and growth trend over time.
- Volume and cost of data in and out of your cloud centers.
- Growth in total spend by customer or business unit.
Not all hosting from the same vendor is of equal cost. All application systems should have an expected profile as part of their metadata. For each of the deployable units, there should be profile data calling out the expected resource utilization of that component. Applications should be profiled for performance and processing bottlenecks.
Some resources do not cost money when idle, while others do. Know which is which. Turn off resources not in use and turn them on again when needed.
Contact us today to request an assessment of your cloud capabilities. We’ll give you our best recommendation on a road map forward. And we’ll get you up to speed fast.