Cloud servers and services from AWS, Azure, Google and others let developers and business teams spin up systems and services in minutes. The cloud drives rapid innovation. Test and learn cycles accelerate when servers and integrations are quickly spun and evaluated, then rebuilt in production based on learning.
In a tough economy, businesses are looking at every area to reduce unneeded spending and inefficiency. Overspending on unused cloud resources can be a big opportunity. Both Google and Amazon have reported slowing growth for their AWS and GCP cloud platforms as companies get smarter about cloud spend. The graphs below this article show the rapid deceleration in cloud growth.
One watch-out is expensive cloud resource creep. Often, fast paced organizations delay ending unused cloud services due to caution or other priorities. Over time, this leads to paying for unused capabilities and in large companies there can be six figure annual cloud bills for unused resources. Many times needed cloud resources are under-utilized and capacity and utilization hours can be dialed down, saving major money. The potential for overspend increases in multi-cloud organizations and where many teams and people have the ability to fire up new cloud services.
Every company should have an ultimate owner of the company cloud services who regularly audits and prunes unused services. In addition to reducing expenses, this improves security by reducing unmanaged, forgotten cloud resources that can fall behind on proactive security updates.
Make time to audit your full inventory of cloud resources at least quarterly. This task should have a clear owner, usually from the DevOps or infrastructure team. Identify the owner and business function of each resource. Examine allocated capacity versus utilized capacity for each service. Very often, organizations find services that can be reduced or deprecated, savings dollars that add up fast.
Need help implementing an audit and ongoing processes to control the cloud? Contact us to learn more. We’ve helped a large number of companies control the cloud across many providers.
