HOW TO ELIMINATE CLOUD WASTE – 4 CLOUD OPTIMIZATION TACTICS | INVENTIVE
With cloud service spending projected to grow by 17% in 2020 and reach a spend level of $266.4 billion, it’s clear that the cloud is going to continue to grow in popularity and improve the infrastructure of countless businesses. However, for businesses inexperienced with the cloud it can be easy to overspend on their cloud services; this leads to what is known as cloud waste.
Unfortunately, for businesses not familiar with diagnosing cloud waste, it can be difficult to determine which of your spend is actually being used to better your business. Luckily, our team at Inventive has dedicated services to eliminate cloud waste for clients and optimize their cloud footprints for optimal performance. Keep reading for a deeper dive into our cloud optimization services!
IMPROVING CLOUD SPEED
No matter if it’s a website or an app that’s running on the cloud, both applications likely present an opportunity for speed improvements. Common optimizations to improve cloud speed include:
- Optimizing your storage environment
- Utilizing a converged infrastructure
- Improving the end-user experience
Appropriate storage management, an infrastructure with more power and better utilization metrics, and optimizing the user experience will all lead to improved speeds that you and your customers are sure to notice. To ensure that high-speed is achieved and maintained, consistent monitoring of the cloud infrastructure will ensure new issues are quickly found and diagnosed to prevent them from happening again. Regular monitoring will also create speed improvements over time as issues are consistently found and resolved.
PREVENTING DOWNTIME
Website and app crashes are so impactful that downtime for popular retailers like Amazon, WalMart, and Home Depot is usually in tomorrow’s news coverage. While your business’ downtime may not make the news (thankfully), the inconvenience it’s sure to cause your customers and internal stakeholders is absolutely worth preventing. On top of the inconvenience, any downtime your app or website experiences is interfering with your bottom line.
To prevent any cloud downtime, our experts will likely recommend a combination of adopting a multi-cloud environment, improving cloud security, and the addition of CDN services. While the specifics will certainly be prescribed to fit your business’ unique situation, you can rest assured that any improvements in your site or app’s downtime will lead to increased business growth down the line.
CLOUD SYSTEM SCALING
Monitoring cloud system scaling goes in two directions. The first being your current cloud setup might be oversized for your business’ needs which can ultimately lead to significant cloud waste. The size of the cloud infrastructure needed is totally dependent upon the size of your application as well as the amount of traffic it consistently receives. Unfortunately, most businesses don’t take the time to determine their cloud needs, in fact, reports estimate that over $5.3 billion was wasted on oversized resources in 2019.
One of the most common types of overspending we can help eliminate is the use of idle resources. For example, many applications take advantage of non-production environments for development and testing, but those resources are rarely used 24/7. By reducing the number of idle resources used, your business will save big money.
The second direction cloud system scaling optimization can take is determining if your current infrastructure is too small for your needs. If you continue to notice downtime, the size of your current infrastructure is likely one of the driving factors. Our team will be able to diagnose the actual cloud system size your application needs so you can ensure you’re not overspending and that your customers can access your application at any time.
MAINTAINING AND IMPROVING SECURITY
Methods to extract private and personal information from websites and apps continue to become more sophisticated, so it’s imperative that you address cloud security as soon as possible. Our team specializes in working with Azure, AWS, and other public cloud vendors. Not only can they `easily recognize security vulnerabilities, but they also know both the quick fixes and long term solutions to address any security or privacy issues.
One of the most common recommendations our team provides is to authenticate and monitor all application and cloud access, but this is certainly not an all-inclusive approach to cloud security.
