Smart Tactics to Reduce Cloud Waste for Your Business

Cloud computing has revolutionised business operations, offering scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency. However, it also brings the challenge of cloud waste. At Hilt Digital, based in Wirral and serving clients across Liverpool, Chester, North West England, and North Wales, we understand the detrimental impact of unnecessary cloud spending on small and medium-sized businesses.

Understanding Cloud Waste

Cloud waste refers to the excess expenditure on cloud services that are underutilised or not optimised. Studies indicate that approximately 32% of cloud spending is wasted, leading to inflated budgets and financial strain for businesses.

The Opportunity in Cloud Waste

This figure reveals a significant opportunity to save nearly a third of your cloud costs by optimising usage. By adopting smart tactics, businesses can reduce expenses and enhance efficiency, benefiting industries such as accountancy firms, estate agents, law firms, schools, and construction companies across the North West.

Conduct a Comprehensive Cloud Audit

Before cutting costs, it’s essential to understand your current cloud utilisation. A thorough cloud audit helps identify:

• Underutilised resources
• Overprovisioned instances
• Unnecessary services

Using cloud management tools, generate reports on usage patterns, costs, and performance metrics. This initial assessment is crucial for implementing effective waste reduction strategies.

Implement Right-Sizing Strategies

Right-sizing involves aligning your cloud resources with the actual demands of your workloads. Many businesses overprovision, securing more resources than necessary, leading to increased costs.

Steps to Right-Size

1. Analyse workload requirements: Assess the actual needs of your applications.
2. Resize instances accordingly: Use tools from your cloud provider to adjust resource capacity.
3. Pay only for what you need: Ensure you are not overspending on unused resources.

Utilise Reserved Instances and Savings Plans

Cloud providers offer cost-saving options like Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans. These allow businesses to commit to specific usage levels in exchange for discounted rates.

Maximising Savings

• Analyse workload and usage patterns: Understand your long-term needs.
• Choose the right plan: Select a reserved capacity or savings plan that aligns with your business goals.
• Leverage discounts: Reduce your overall cloud costs by committing to sustained usage.

Install Automated Scaling Policies

Dynamic workloads require dynamic resource allocation. Automated scaling policies ensure your infrastructure adjusts based on demand, optimising performance and preventing overprovisioning during low activity periods.

Benefits of Automated Scaling

• Optimised resource utilisation: Scale up during peak times and scale down when not needed.
• Improved performance: Maintain application responsiveness without manual intervention.
• Cost savings: Only pay for the resources you use.

Track and Optimise Storage

Storage costs can quickly accumulate, especially when data is not regularly reviewed and managed. Estimating your storage needs and implementing lifecycle policies can help reduce these costs.

Storage Optimisation Tips

• Estimate storage requirements: Understand how much data you need to store.
• Implement lifecycle policies: Automatically transition less frequently accessed data to lower-cost storage options.
• Regularly review and delete: Remove unnecessary data to free up space and reduce costs.

Schedule Your Cloud Resources

Running cloud resources only when needed can significantly cut costs. For example, turn off development or testing environments during nights and weekends, or scale down production environments during off-peak hours.

How to Schedule Resources

• Use automation tools: Set predefined schedules based on your business needs.
• Define rules and policies: Create automated workflows to manage resource usage efficiently.

Delete Unused or Orphaned Cloud Resources

Unused or orphaned resources, such as snapshots, backups, volumes, load balancers, and IP addresses, can accumulate and incur unnecessary costs. Regularly auditing and deleting these resources is essential.

Steps to Remove Unused Resources

1. Audit your cloud environment: Identify unused or orphaned resources.
2. Delete unnecessary items: Remove resources that are no longer needed.
3. Use cloud provider tools: Utilise tools to find and eliminate unused resources efficiently.

Weed Out Duplicate Services

Different departments might use duplicate cloud services, leading to unnecessary costs. Centralising cloud resources and removing duplicate tools can save money and enhance collaboration.

Centralisation Benefits

• Cost savings: Reduce expenses by eliminating redundant services.
• Enhanced collaboration: Use the same tools across departments for better integration and reporting.
• Simplified management: Streamline cloud resource management with unified tools.

Embrace Serverless Architecture

Serverless computing allows businesses to run applications without managing the underlying infrastructure. You only pay for the compute resources you use, reducing both operational complexity and costs.

Advantages of Serverless

• Cost efficiency: Pay only for what you use.
• Scalability: Automatically scale with demand.
• Reduced maintenance: Eliminate the need to provision and manage servers.

Schedule a Cloud Optimisation Assessment Today!

By adopting these smart tactics, your business can reduce cloud waste, optimise spending, and enhance operational efficiency. At Hilt Digital, we offer a range of services, including managed infrastructure, proactive monitoring and maintenance, SentinelOne endpoint protection, penetration testing, dark web monitoring, and Azure cloud consultancy and management.

Are you grappling with rising cloud costs? Let our team of cloud experts in Wirral, Liverpool, Chester, and the North West help you identify and eliminate cloud waste.

Contact us today to schedule your assessment.