How to Optimise Your Cloud Spend: Tips for Saving Money in the Cloud

Audit Your Estate

It may sound obvious, but you’d be surprised how many organisations don’t actually know the scope of their cloud infrastructure. If you don’t know where your cloud estate begins and ends, you’ll have little chance of getting your cloud costs under control. Audit your estate to ensure you’ve captured everything.

Audit Your Suppliers, Too

Over 90% of large organisations deploy multi-cloud architectures, and SMEs aren’t too far behind. Your organisation may well divide its cloud spend between a number of suppliers. Make sure you audit these too, so you know where you’re spending money – and who you’re spending it with.

Check What’s Being Used and What Isn’t

Once you’ve audited your cloud estate, you’ll probably discover that many of the services you’re paying for aren’t being used. Make sure you’re diligent before you shut any services down – they sometimes interact with other services you wouldn’t expect. But once you’ve identified what can be lost, you may well find that a chunk of your cloud spend has now been freed up.

Right-Size Your Resources

When organisations deploy servers, they often go a little overboard on resources. You know, just in case. Engineers can also increase resources as a blunt force tactic to deal with performance issues. Either way, it’s worth checking and right-sizing your cloud resources – you could well find that a lot of servers are seriously over-specified.

Consider Reserved Instances

Reserved instances offer organisations significantly reduced rates in return for one-year or three-year commitment terms. So if you know for sure that some of your servers will be in use for some time to come, consider moving from a pay-as-you-go model to reserved instances – you can save a significant amount if you do.

Introduce Best Practice Processes

It’s no good carrying out a point in time audit and streamlining your server estate if people continue to spin up resources without documenting them properly – you’ll end up in the same place again soon enough. Introduce best practice processes to ensure this doesn’t happen.

Embrace FinOps Principles

FinOps – a blend of ‘Finance’ and ‘DevOps’ – is a cultural practice that enables organisations to manage their cloud costs. FinOps requires ownership and collaboration between cross-functional teams, including engineering, finance, technology, and business. By working together in alignment with FinOps practices, these teams can gain financial visibility, control, and predictability – enabling you to gain control over cloud consumption, while also making informed decisions to deliver services better and faster.

Save Money in the Cloud

All organisations can be smarter in how they approach cloud spend. By following the tips outlined above your organisation can:

• Improve visibility. Achieve greater visibility into your cloud spend, gaining transparency around what is being spent – and where.
• Make better decisions. With increased visibility comes empirical evidence that will enable you to make better decisions around how you allocate cloud spend.
• Optimise cloud spend. Identify and address inefficiencies, optimising cloud spend by ensuring it is focused where it is needed.

Six Degrees enables organisations to introduce FinOps principles that can lead to savings of between 18 and 40% of monthly Azure spend, if acted upon. Find out more about our FinOps High Level Report and Workshop.

You can learn about cloud best practices through our Cloud Masterclass education series. The Cloud Masterclass series will enable you to gain confidence in your skills, grow your knowledge, and experience real world discussions on the latest cloud technologies and issues with peers and industry experts. Register your interest.