Organizations tend to consume more cloud resources than necessary. In order to better utilize your cloud and avoid waste focus on planning, visibility and skillset.
Digital transformation is part and parcel of any business these days. Cloud computing is among the leading transformational experiences an industry undergoes in recent times. Cloud services are said to be inexpensive, and people rave about the cost-effectiveness of its resources. But, if left idle and unmonitored, resource usage can accumulate by the minute. Thus, making your cloud experience expensive and unpleasant. It is of grave importance to keep your resource consumption in check for the best cloud computing experience.
There are some ways you can avoid under-utilization of your cloud. Let's take a look at some key areas that you can focus on to prevent wastage of cloud resources:
Planning
Due to lack of proper planning, idle cloud resources start accumulating. There are different reasons for under-utilization of the cloud, and commonly it is the budget allocation that takes the blame. Not to mention, the confusion whether public, private or hybrid is the best solution for your workloads, is also a significant player. Without the right knowledge of your use cases and requirements, you are setting yourself up to fail in cloud utilization.
Therefore, to avoid cloud waste, businesses need to understand their cloud goals? Are you moving to the cloud for scalability or agility or maybe cost reduction? They will all have different implications for how you set up your cloud infrastructure and make use of its resources. You can choose cloud services more wisely once you begin to understand your cloud goals and needs.
Visibility
Visibility is vital for any organization. It is not ideal for planning profusely only to lose visibility of your usage post cloud deployment. Adequate control over the cloud environment is necessary. Keep an eye on spinning resources up and down. Visibility and control should also stretch to new technologies like containers, microservices and serverless computing.
If existing tools meet the requirements of your cloud architecture, then maintaining control is easy. So you must be aware of legacy tools and their ability to match up to your cloud ecosystem. If you are falling behind, it is time to reevaluate your control strategy and plan.
Skillset
The knowledge base and skill set of your IT staff is crucial for avoiding cloud waste. Employees need to understand the difference between legacy infrastructure and cloud systems to know not to make costly mistakes. Moreover, legacy systems are still in place in many organizations, contributing avidly to the current IT setup. Therefore, it is not advisable to focus only on cloud skills at the expense of existing experience and technical know-how.
Auditing the skills of your team gives you a good picture of their capability and identify gaps that need to be filled. Auditing helps in training or hiring members to fulfil the technical needs of the business and the cloud. Adequate preparation of the staff leads to lesser incidents of cloud sprawl.
Fully-Managed Cloud
Following “waste not, want not” strategy is what you need to implement for your organization and its cloud infrastructure. If you are finding it hard to monitor, train and maintain your cloud resources, you can opt for a fully-managed solution.
We at VEXXHOST provide fully-managed OpenStack based private cloud services. While we do all the heavy lifting and take care of the infrastructure layer underneath, you get to focus on the core competencies of your business. Let us take care of everything from management to monitoring, upgrades to support and provide you with the best of cloud services. Get in touch with our experts to know more about how our solution could be the right fit for your business.
