Intelligent Data Centres Issue 30 | Page 36

KNOW WHAT YOU
NEED , DELETE DATA THAT IS NO LONGER IN USE , CUT DOWN ON DATA MOVEMENT WHERE POSSIBLE
AND , MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL , REGULARLY
REVIEW YOUR CLOUD STORAGE
STRATEGY .
FEATURE

KNOW WHAT YOU

NEED , DELETE DATA THAT IS NO LONGER IN USE , CUT DOWN ON DATA MOVEMENT WHERE POSSIBLE

AND , MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL , REGULARLY

REVIEW YOUR CLOUD STORAGE

STRATEGY .

With the right strategy , organisations can make the public cloud work harder for them and avoid overspending . With growing cloud usage , there is a high likelihood that organisations will struggle to get a handle on their increased cloud expenditure . Every organisation wants to reduce its operational costs , wherever possible , and public cloud spend is an area that many are already overspending on .
Most , if not all , organisations today have recognised the many competitive advantages that cloud computing brings to the digital landscape , but few have been able to adopt the technology with a consistent and optimised strategy to reduce costs .
Here are five questions that will identify if you may have a public cloud spending problem :
1 . Do we know how many open public cloud accounts we have ?
Typically , an organisation will have multiple accounts with multiple cloud providers and because the public cloud is designed to empower anyone in an organisation to set up an account and allocate resources , those with authorisation to do so often create accounts without any centralised notification .
It ’ s simple to spin up an instance for a project and then forget to shut it down . Many teams deal with orphaned instances that have no ownership but still continue to generate costs . In the same vein , shadow IT projects often produce poorly accounted for resources in the cloud . The end result is that no one within the organisation actually knows how many public cloud accounts the organisation has open .
2 . Do we really understand our monthly cloud bills ?
Cloud bills can be hard to understand . They ’ re long , complicated and hard to comprehend . A monthly cloud bill will likely contain a number of pages with various lines and reference many service names , instance types and regions – none of which are self-explanatory .
If you do not understand your monthly cloud bill , it ’ s difficult to know what you are paying for and therefore virtually impossible to make informed decisions about the services that are needed , those that could be reduced or to understand where the additional charges come from .
3 . Can we match approved purchases to specific initiatives or cost centres ?
Organisations with multiple teams , budgets and projects often do not have
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