BUDGETING FOR THE CLOUD? DO THESE 5 THINGS.
It is already that time of the year, when most of you are reviewing and planning for next year’s IT Budget. For budgeteers, while the feeling of resource inadequacy is perpetual, here are 5 things you ought to consider when it comes to budgeting for the cloud, more specifically PaaS and IaaS.
1. Take timeout for ‘Cloudkeeping’ –Yes, it’s your cloud and you need to keep it in order. How often do you review your cloud resources? Every month? You should. After all, don’t we pay cloud bills on a monthly basis. Nonetheless, annual budgeting can be a good time as any to review the cloud resources being consumed. Tough questions like “What happens if we shut or scale it down?”, can really make people think about the utility of the resources that have been running. Starting budget planning off a reduced cost can really help you accommodate and fund key and strategic projects for next year.
2. Over provisioning is a sin, don’t commit one – Do you operate at peak capacity at all times? Then why plan cloud resources for maximum capacity or peak workloads? Get over this fear of the hardware running out of juice when most needed. If you plan the loading of the resources or if we monitor the usage pattern, chances are you can figure out the resource sizes which are optimum for the workload. This way you can save almost 50% on cloud resource spending, by “rightsizing” the resources and increasing or decreasing the resource tier when required. With cloud resources the good part is that we can re-size the resources within seconds. So imagine the savings that can be achieved across all of your cloud infrastructure by adopting this scale on demand strategy. This approach works best if you have automation in place, which brings us to the next point about automation as a way to reduce spending.
3. Benefit from Automate and Auto-Scale – Most public clouds provide ways and means to automate cloud deployment and management operations. Therefore, it is important to invest time and resources to make sure your cloud IT infrastructure is taking benefit of this automation. Automated scale up and scale down of resources, based on the load, can save a lot of money. Investing in this automation would pay for itself in savings. There are other benefits to automation as well. Automated deployments can save on Cloud IT Operations cost. Automated monitoring and alerting can not only help recover from errors, but automated recovery actions again can help save on Cloud IT Operations cost.
4. Tags are so so necessary – If you are not already using tags on your cloud resources, it is a good time to do it as part of your resource review. Tags are a great way to identify users/business or organization units or projects utilising the resources. It not only helps in identifying the resources to be deleted or the right people to approve the deletion, it can also be used to get segregation of cloud spending on tags basis, providing you great insights on spending pattern and charge back if necessary. As companies go through reorgs and changes, tags help find the rightful owners of resources, to make sure you take the right decisions for the resources.
5. Evaluate a Multi-Cloud Strategy – While there are obvious benefits of staying on one cloud, if your infrastructure is large enough, it helps to evaluate if you are ready to go multi-cloud. There may be multiple reasons to consider going multi-cloud. It could be a good costing discount or a packaged deal for adopting a new cloud. It could be a specific PaaS offering, which suits your needs best. It is important to balance the cloud billing cost, cloud IT management cost and the specific benefit being considered. Doing this analysis at the beginning of a budget cycle enables you to provision for the added cost or benefit that you are seeking.
Happy budgeting, people.
