During the first half of 2020, business had to adapt to a new way of living, communicating, and doing day to day business in lockdown. Not only has this has raised multiple challenges on how teams can work better from home but has also resulted in additional budget required for facilitating remote working, from software to productivity tools and event artificial intelligence to streamline teamwork.
It’s becoming clear that these new remote working conditions are not just an interim solution but will be adopted as the normal way of working for many organisations. In addition, companies are investing more in internal analytics in different areas of their organisation including marketing, operations, finance, and HR and turning an eye on the data they are collecting.
Therefore, during the last six months there has been a significant increase in companies across Australia and New Zealand migrating from IT on-premises storage to the cloud as a response to a volatile environment and to support remote working conditions.
While this has brought great benefits, many businesses might be underutilising cloud resources and using the wrong service tier plus many companies don’t have any mature cost management processes in place. This lack of cost governance can prove costly in the long run as teams spin up new services and environments. As a result, many companies are paying far more than they need to do for their cloud services.
All of this sounds very daunting but can cloud cost optimisation help you control your Azure cloud budget?
Good Cost Management processes are a big part to keep you cloud cost under control, as a simple click from a user can cost thousands of dollars without finding out until the bill comes knocking at the end of the month (assuming the right person sees it!).
Here are some quick tips to minimise your Azure costs:
1. Make sure you are not over-utilising resources
Every resource has its own specific pricing; if the job for that tier can be on a smaller size you are paying more than you should to. You can check the utilisation of each resource, if its lower than 70% usage then you can possibly down-size a tier.
2. Have good governance processes in place
This is slightly harder to achieve but very important for you to know. Make sure you have processes in place so your developers cannot spin up costly resources that are not needed or underutilised. Use tagging, DevOps and other processes to minimize the risk of errant cost spend.
3. Scheduled shutdowns
Do regular reviews on your resources to check if schedule shutdowns can be implemented to save money. This is particular useful on batch analytics workloads like Data Warehouses with high-costs for a certain period of time. Usual suspects are SQL DW, AAS, VMs.
Would you like to reduce your Azure costs?
CloudMonitor monitors your cloud consumption costs and looks for cost-saving opportunities so you only pay for what you need. CloudMonitor finds over-sized resources and services that are no longer in use and suggests best-practices based on real-time utilization patterns.
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