How much would you be able to save?

Does your cloud solution come at a high cost? Of course, operating software solutions incurs expenses, but do you know if your setup provides optimal value for money?

We examined the cloud costs for a client and managed to achieve a 58% reduction in their IT budget.

It's possible to manage and control the costs in the cloud environment. Monitoring can be set up, requirements can be established for the operations department to be involved in provisioning new resources, and regular clean-ups can be conducted.

However, this responsibility demands new skills within the operations department. But could more be done? In many cases, we dare to think that there is more to be found.

Our approach this to thoroughly scrutinize the cloud expenses once our clients' systems have reached a certain level of maturity. For one of our clients, following this review, we were able to save 58% of their IT budget. Therefore, conducting a review like this is certainly an investment proven worthwhile. This is agreed upon by both us and the IT manager.

But what does it take?

First of all you should have a primary focus on cost considerations, as a requirement for your DevOps projects within the organization. However, these principles could also be applied in an organization where development and operations are working separately, and where there is no real DevOps mindset implemented.

You can choose to implement this approach from the beginning of the project. However, in this scenario, there might be a lack of knowledge about where to precisely direct efforts, as there is no empirical data yet on how resources will be utilized over time.

Another option is to implement it when Azure's built-in guidance recommends it. But in this situation, it might be Azure itself that lacks knowledge about how resources will be utilized over time.

Alternatively, you can choose to implement this approach when notifications/alarms from Azure indicate that a budget has been exceeded. However, this requires setting up a budget beforehand and a realistic budget. This could be challenging, as there is a lack of data on how resources are used over time.

Scrutinize your cloud-setup

At cVation, we perform this analysis continuously, as our projects mature and our clients' focus on costs associated with their 'new' cloud solutions increases.

We closely examine the most significant expenses across development, testing, and production environments. The most cost-intensive resources receive the highest attention. Many resources were not prioritized based on the consideration that development hours couldn't be financed through savings from those specific resources.

To learn more about our approach on two specific projects, read this blog post.

How do you start to evaluate your solutions?

If you want to determine whether your cloud solutions are correctly optimized, start by investigating if the project or your organization is setting the right requirements to optimize costs for your cloud solution.

A few questions you can begin to ask:

• Do you have the right skills to optimize costs?

• Are you transitioning from an operations and development setup to DevOps?

• How much money could you save on your cloud solutions without increasing your time-to-market or reducing your ability to experiment with new solutions that support the business?

Whether there is room for improvement can often be clarified within a relatively short time after reviewing your setup.

We are, of course, available for a thorough review and just a phone call away if you need assistance with the process.