Cloud Optimization Strategies: The What, Why, and How

Cloud optimization essentially refers to the process of individually selecting and distributing the right resources to a workload or an application. This enables you to resource power applications, infrastructures, and workloads to maximize performance.

Now that the definition’s out of the way, let’s get to the meat of the matter. Cloud optimization is the middle ground between being cost-effective and delivering value. 

Why is cloud optimization important? 

In order to reduce the cost and boost the infrastructure, you need to optimize your cloud. This is the easiest and the cheapest way to manage and establish data for a data center today. It provides effortless and transparent integration with other systems, quick analysis, and ability to expand immediately if needed. Cloud service needs to be constantly monitored and updated, so that the resources ensure productivity. This can also help to improve your application performance. Hence, opting for cloud leads to operations and more importantly, financial success. 

How is cloud optimization achieved?

Using Cloud Analytics

Cloud management service providers should be constantly reporting to show that they are working at their peak efficiency. Cloud analytics can also help you to find out how the cloud business has changed over the time. In the absence of cloud analytics, it is very difficult to tell an inferior service from that which is working well for your enterprise. 

Governance Structure

When the governance structure is in place, it will help you determine how the organization will monitor the cloud solution and approach the policies. Some things that a Governance Board can oversee include adherence to compliance and regulatory requirements, authorization levels to cloud  services and the different ways that cloud solutions can be applied. A major cut down can be done in the number of inefficient instances, with respect to the cloud usage.

Choosing the Right MSPs

The right cloud MSP (Managed Service Provider) has the ability to maximize your ROI. For this, you should select a cloud MSP with a good track record, who has the ability to design uniquely hosted solutions for clients and who offer competitive pricing. 

Determine Your Application’s Structure 

The application structure is the guide to your cloud optimization. It can determine how it will scale, and might impact your sizing strategy. 

You can optimize cloud solutions with the right cloud MSP and changing the service level agreement (SLA). Additionally, in-depth analytics and measuring can help to optimize cloud. Despite traffic increasing, your performance will not be interrupted and you will get better returns from your cloud spending.

Find Unused or Unattached Resources

The easiest way to optimize the cloud is to look for unused or unaffiliated resources. Often an administrator or developer might turn on a server to perform a function, and forget to turn it off when the job is done. Another example being, the administrator may forget to remove storage attached to files and things they terminate. This is a very common happening across IT firms. A cloud optimization strategy should be started by identifying unused and completely unattached resources and then removing them. 

Right Size Computing Services

Right sizing is the process of analyzing computing services and modifying them to the most efficient size. It becomes difficult to size instances when cloud administrators have more than 1.7 million possible combinations to choose from. In addition to this, there are options for servers to optimize memory, computing, database, graphics, storage capacity, and more. Right sizing tools can also recommend changes if necessary. It not only helps in reducing cloud costs, it also helps with cloud optimization, which in turn means achieving peak performance from the resources you are paying for. 

Consider Multi-Cloud vs. Single Cloud

In order to avoid vendor lock in, some organizations seek multi-cloud solutions. While this is not a bad idea for increasing availability and system reliability, these organizations may risk losing discounts by a single cloud vendor. The ability to save money with a multi-cloud strategy could be overshadowed by the administrative inconvenience of switching between platforms, not to forget, paying for network traffic between clouds, and the additional training staff on multiple clouds.

Cloud optimization should be a must for any enterprise with cloud-based, medium-to-large applications that have a necessity to scale back value . If you’ve got a solid annual cloud pay and frequent updates, then you would like cloud value improvement. Finding the correct cloud improvement answer ought to be one in all your prime priorities. 

If all this seems too much to you, don’t be bothered. Econz Cloud is here to help. Talk to us.