Cloud storage is growing in popularity among businesses. We’ve covered this area quite a bit, but we want to make sure your business is informed to make the right decisions to best suit your company’s needs and finances. One area of cloud storage that can wreak havoc on your business is a phenomenon called cloud waste. This happens when your storage expenses start to climb faster than your revenue and becomes a hidden drain on your budget when you are spending money on resources that bring no value to your business. Some examples you might find are underused servers or data storage for projects that have been long completed or abandoned. Controlling cloud waste not only saves you money but also helps you to reinvest that money into new innovations, your team, or stronger security.
Often, over-scaling use for an upcoming project adds expense, and as the project goes on, much of the space goes unused. The server continues running all the while and you get billed for every hour of unuse. Resources that have been abandoned or orphaned are another common drain because team members forget to delete storage and IP addresses that were used. These can quietly add up with time.
Unfortunately, one-off audits will not be enough to tackle cloud waste. A culture of awareness and financial accountability are necessary. In this kind of environment, members of the finance, tech, and business teams must work together to make spending decisions and cut needless waste.
Here are some simple ways to combat this:
- Assign a person to each resource to manage its usage and potential waste.
- Look into third-party cloud cost optimization tools to use insights for detecting waste. Often, these tools can recommend actions you can take to adjust your usage based on your need and can consolidate all the information into a dashboard, which can be especially helpful if you use multiple cloud providers.
- Schedule for non-production environments to automatically turn off during nights and weekends.
- Add storage lifecycle policies to your team so that old data can be deleted.
- Adjust the size of your servers according to how much is actually being used. If the CPU is being used less than 20% of the time, you can bet that your server is too big and is wasting money.
- Look for discounts with cloud providers. Often times, when you commit to consistent use of their resources, they offer substantial savings.
- Check in regularly with your leadership team to review cloud spending against your budgets and business goals.
Don’t let cloud waste become a drain on your business. Call Tech Eagles today for a free assessment!
