Cloud Cost Management & Optimization Solutions

Managing cloud spending at the corporate level comes with many difficulties. Proactive and all-encompassing cloud environment management ensures continued, economical cloud operations and maximizes the amount of cloud for every dollar spent by organizations.

 At Densify, we frequently interact with businesses that have dabbled in public cloud computing, drawn by the opportunities to experiment with cutting-edge technology, have access to nearly infinite resource capacity, and be able to develop more quickly.

All too frequently, when large, confusing cloud provider bills increase, businesses start to doubt their cloud investments. Many businesses that are having difficulty reducing their cloud expenses question whether going cloud was the appropriate choice for them in the first place.

However, it is possible to optimize cloud costs, primarily through the identification and correction of inadequate cloud infrastructure provisioning and the implementation of best practices for cloud financial management. Enterprises can reap the rewards of high availability, agility, elasticity, and dependability.

What is Cloud Cost Optimization?

Companies may save a lot of money by moving data and apps from conventional on-premises data centers to cloud infrastructure. This can also help them stay competitive, accelerate innovation, and improve customer and employee relations. Furthermore, with the majority of public cloud providers, IT infrastructure becomes a pay-as-you-go operational expense. Costs will change as you scale your cloud resources up or down to match demand. But, as cloud services can often cost more than you expect, it's important to keep an eye on and maximise your cloud spending.

In order to lower cloud expenses, determine the most economical approach to run your apps in the cloud, and increase business value, cloud cost optimization cloud cost optimization includes strategies, techniques, best practices, and technologies.

When utilizing multiple cloud options, it's crucial to understand, evaluate, and optimize your spending on cloud operations. Effective cost management ensures you get the best value from your cloud services, helping to control expenses while maintaining performance and scalability.

Four Ways to Use Azure Cost Management and Related Tools to Optimise Azure Costs

Azure Cost Management is intended to assist businesses in identifying underutilised resources, getting rid of waste, and cutting expenses.

Report on Cost Analysis

You may do a detailed analysis of your organization's costs by using Azure resource attributes to segment costs in the Cost Analysis report in Azure Cost Management Azure Cost Management.

The following are some examples of queries that the cost analysis report can be used to answer:

• What are the monthly expenses going to be?
  Check your spending to see if certain cost entities are within their allocated budget.
• Are there any unusual costs?
  Examine any unusual service usage or cost spikes, and confirm that the costs are acceptable and suitable for routine use. 
• Did you expect the amount on the invoice?
  Make sure the billing is what you intended by comparing your Azure bill to the actual amount of services used. Examine if there have been any notable variations from prior months.
• How can expenses be divided amongst cost entities and departments?
  Verify the appropriate allocation of Azure expenses among projects, organizational units, and individuals.
  
  

Budgets for Azure

You can set an Azure service budget based on consumption or cost using the Budgets tool in Azure Cost Management. Budgets should be reviewed often to determine whether any particular funds have run out and to make any necessary adjustments.

You may set up automated triggers for improved cloud control with Azure Budget. For instance, you can set up a service to terminate virtual machines (VMs) if a predetermined budget is over. Additionally, you can use budget triggers to move your infrastructure to different service tiers.

Azure Cost Estimator

The Azure Pricing Calculator is frequently used in conjunction with Azure Cost Management to assess costs for various Azure service combinations. When introducing new workloads to Azure or greatly increasing current workloads, this is helpful.

A given application or service can be run in a variety of ways in Azure, and the fees associated with various services, service tiers, or options can vary significantly. The Pricing Calculator can be used to estimate expenses for various configurations and comprehend pricing for Azure usage in the future. 

Azure Consultant

• Azure Advisor is a service that can find ways to save money on Azure, such as:
• underutilised virtual machines, particularly with regard to network or CPU usage. After that, you can choose to resize or shut down the virtual machines.
• acquiring Reserved Instances (RIs) for virtual machines (VMs) that have been operating steadily for a while.
• deleting public IP addresses, virtual network gateways, and ExpressRoute circuits that are not in use.
• Reduce overhead by properly scaling your MariaDB, MySQL, or PostgreSQL instances. 
  
  Techniques to Increase Cost Awareness & Optimize Cloud Spend
  Businesses that are successful set up best practices for using the cloud. At Densify, we assign a specialized technical team of Cloud Advisors to assist our clients' organizations in fine-tuning their FinOps procedures and cloud operating models. The goal of this team is to help our customers create appropriate procedures to rein in their cloud overspending by increasing awareness of cloud spend and posing challenging questions. We understand the frustration of trying to decipher your cloud bill while analyzing your Azure cost and usage data. Our cloud cost intelligence solution is trusted by some of the world's largest companies to sift through thousands of line items in their Azure cost and usage reports. However, simply understanding your cloud bill is not enough; it is essential to take proactive steps to reduce overspending. By leveraging our solution, you can gain actionable insights to optimize costs and ensure efficient cloud resource management, ultimately driving significant savings and enhanced operational efficiency. 1. Monitor and Analyze Usage: - Regularly review Azure Cost Management + Billing for insights on usage and spending patterns. - Set up alerts and budgets to track spending against predefined limits. 2. Right-Size Resources: - Regularly assess and adjust the size of VMs and other resources to match workload requirements.

  3. Utilize Reserved Instances:

     - Purchase reserved instances for predictable workloads to benefit from cost savings over pay-as-you-go pricing.

  
  

  4. Leverage Azure Cost Management Tools:

     - Use Azure Advisor for personalized recommendations on cost optimization.

     - Employ the Azure Pricing Calculator to estimate costs and identify cheaper alternatives.

  
  

  5. Optimize Storage:

     - Archive infrequently accessed data using lower-cost storage tiers.

     - Clean up unused or orphaned resources to avoid unnecessary charges.

  
  

  6. Automate Resource Management:

     - Implement automation to start/stop VMs based on usage patterns to reduce costs during non-peak hours.

  
  

  By implementing these practices, businesses can enhance their awareness of Azure cloud spending and effectively optimize costs.
  
  
  

  Subsequent Actions for Cloud Optimization
  
  

  Cloud cost optimization doesn't have to be difficult, but it requires a methodical approach that fosters healthy rightsizing practices and consistently uses analytics to generate insights and actions to reduce your cloud expenses. IFI Techsolutions excels in this area.

  
  

  Request a personalized demo and one of our cloud advisors will review your existing Azure cloud optimization plan, provide you with additional success strategies, and showcase our comprehensive cloud cost management features. With IFI Techsolutions, you can ensure your Azure cloud investments are maximized efficiently and effectively.

•