Businesses worldwide are embracing the cloud for its scalability, flexibility, and cost-effective pay-as-you-go model. However, while the cloud offers numerous benefits, it also presents challenges, including underutilized resources, unchecked spending, inefficient provisioning, and rising costs. 

Recent findings from Flexera highlight that cost optimization tools rank as the second most utilized tools in multi-cloud environments, with 29% of respondents recognizing their importance. Surprisingly, managing cloud expenditure has surpassed security concerns as a top challenge. Clearly, organizations are keenly aware of the need for effective solutions to achieve cloud cost optimization.

This is where Cloud Managed Service Providers (MSPs) come into play, offering invaluable assistance in managing complex cloud infrastructures and enhancing operational efficiency to achieve cloud cost optimization. Let’s delve into how they accomplish this:

1. Automated Monitoring and Management for Cost Optimization

One of the key strategies MSPs employ to drive cloud cost optimization is automated monitoring and management. These processes continuously scrutinize cloud usage patterns, allowing organizations to identify and address inefficiencies and unused resources, leading to significant cost savings.

For example, imagine discovering that a specific microservice, while not mission-critical, consumes a substantial portion of your cloud budget. A thorough cloud efficiency assessment, facilitated by your MSP, can evaluate the overall performance of cloud resources in relation to their respective expenditures.

2. Strategic Resource Allocation and Utilization

Effective resource allocation, often referred to as “rightsizing,” is crucial for achieving optimal efficiency. According to the Flexera report, annual public cloud waste stands at a staggering 28%, with nearly a quarter of respondents spending over $12 million annually on public cloud services.

Another report from 2020 found that 30% of cloud spending goes to waste. This waste can result from unused and inactive resources, as well as active resources that are underutilized or idle. For instance, database warehouses can unintentionally inflate cloud expenses, and failing to deactivate testing environments can lead to substantial cost escalations.

Your MSP can guide you in making informed decisions regarding resource allocation and cost management, ultimately driving cloud cost optimization.

3. Modernization and Workload Optimization for Long-Term Savings

In addition to immediate cost-saving measures, MSPs play a crucial role in long-term cloud cost optimization. They can assist in modernizing your workloads on the cloud, making them more cost-efficient and scalable.

For instance, by re-architecting monolithic applications on the cloud, your applications can dynamically scale to utilize only the necessary resources, reducing operational and maintenance costs significantly. 

By embracing modern approaches like serverless architecture, you don’t need expensive in-house resources to manually scale up or down your cloud infrastructure, you pay only for the actual compute resources used, and you don’t need to lock in resources in upfront payments.

Achieving cloud cost optimization may seem daunting, but with the right MSP partner, it becomes a manageable and efficient process. CloudNow is here to help you evaluate your cloud infrastructure’s performance, align it with your future goals, and optimize it for long-term cost efficiency. Talk to us today.