Cloud Optimization: 3 Benefits That Drive ROI

If you haven’t taken a close enough look at your cloud environment and the spend, performance, and security of your infrastructure, it’s likely that your organization would benefit from cloud optimization services. Let’s explore:

• What cloud optimization is
• What benefits it brings
• How you can use it to improve your business processes while boosting your ROI

What is cloud optimization?

Cloud optimization is about finding the right resource to fit the correct purpose. While cost savings plays a considerable role in this process, optimizing for the cloud is also about which workloads and applications belong where and understanding what resources are needed to run things most effectively .

An optimized cloud would show strong performance, keep costs to a minimum, and be compliant with any industry or business standards that have to be met.

Why should cloud optimization be important to your organization?

For a cloud to truly be optimized, it would have to mean you…

1. Fully understand your organizational needs backwards and forwards
2. Know which workloads should operate where
3. Have figured out how to allocate resources in an efficient, budget-friendly, performance-forward manner

Therefore, cloud infrastructure optimization, is valuable because it demonstrates how intimately you understand what your business needs to perform at its best. Whether you have one workload in the cloud, or you’re operating a multicloud environment, the more you focus on cloud optimization, the more you improve every side of your operations.

3 ROI-driving benefits of cloud optimization

Closely tied with cloud optimization is the idea of cloud cost optimization, an ROI-focused process that helps IT leaders determine the most financially advantageous cloud moves they can make for cost management. Cost plays a major role in cloud optimization and drives ROI in several ways.

Cloud optimization improves visibility

Organizational awareness and visibility improve when a business engages with cloud optimization. By optimizing for the cloud, you can start to uncover more information on…

• How resources are used internally
• Where efficiencies exist
• How cloud spending could best be applied to continue to support and grow your organization

Managing the cloud gets harder the more platforms and environments get added. For businesses looking to cloud scale or be more strategic about their cloud usage, gaining visibility can help your team see:

• Where usage may be higher or lower than expected
• Where demand exists
• Or where efforts might be able to be combined

A bonus perk: the insight gained from improved visibility and the amount of time saved after completing cloud optimization initiatives gives your DevOps team more flexibility to work on other tasks, like further developing your cloud strategy and writing new codes to tackle more organizational problems.

Cloud optimization greatly impacts cloud budget

As previously mentioned, cloud optimization and cloud cost optimization work hand-in-hand. The more you optimize your cloud for performance and efficiency, the more likely it will be that it’s also optimized for budget. Of course, you may also be faced with the question of how to balance performance and the budget. Luckily, that’s where gaining visibility on potential efficiencies comes into play.

It’s easy to treat cloud resources differently than on-premises data centers. How? Moving more resources to cloud workloads than you need simply because it doesn’t require much effort to do it.

However, this can also lead to precipitous increases in cloud spend, where you find yourself paying for services you don’t even need. Gaining transparency on workload needs can combat practices that hurt your budget. It’s important to remember that monitoring overspending is not the job of the provider. Instead, it’s the job of the team managing the workloads on the platform.

Cloud optimization makes it easier to use resources only when needed

Right now, would you be able to identify instances and turn off those that weren’t being used? Once you’ve gotten more visibility on your environment, you can also shut down idle resources, such as development instances, in off-hours. Doing so, will improve performance and lower unnecessary spending during times they won’t be used. When completing this regularly, you can lower your costs and move your budget to other cloud or digital transformation and IT modernization projects.

How can public cloud workloads benefit from cloud optimization?

Putting your workloads on a public cloud platform means that your workloads will be sharing space with other tenants. This model gives businesses the benefit of scalability and flexibility; and, if optimized correctly, can help you pay only for the resources you use and not anymore.

Once you understand more about your usage and gain visibility on your exact needs, you can use that information to sign appropriate contracts with public cloud providers. By opting into contracts with a provider, you can save up to 60% compared to on-demand costs. Say you have workloads that don’t require customized compliance measures due to niche industry requirements or sensitive data. Moving what you can to the public cloud through a cloud optimization project can be hugely beneficial.

What about hybrid cloud environments?

The benefits organizations reap from continuous optimization in public cloud environments are not dissimilar to the benefits of hybrid cloud. Depending on your particular setup, hybrid cloud environments will include a mixture of public cloud and private cloud resources. So, if your hybrid cloud contains a public cloud platform, those benefits will be the same.

Cloud optimization services can also help you determine which workloads should be in which environments. For example, you may find out that you can improve productivity by moving an on-premises workload to the public cloud. However, you may also learn that there are too many dependencies to do this quickly without affecting essential business functions. Optimizing for the cloud means identifying these dependencies and making decisions based on priority, work disruption, investment in new technology, etc.

Driving revenue by implementing cloud optimization

Like most strategic moves, cloud optimization focuses on finding the sequence of steps that will work best for your business. Here are four things you can optimize in your cloud environment that, when implemented, will help you drive revenue:

Cloud cost

Even if they claim to be straightforward, cloud pricing menus can be complicated. Without a watchful eye on the environment, it’s not difficult to rack up unexpected costs. Demand spikes, incremental cost increases, and forgetting to check usage and spending on cloud monitoring tools can saddle your organization with a bill you weren’t expecting to pay.

Focusing on cloud optimization brings intentionality to observing and controlling cloud sprawl and spend in real time. It can help reveal opportunities for different pricing options that may better suit your usage and cut out unnecessary, less cost effective expenses.

Reliability

When it comes to your infrastructure, no two workloads are the same. Some may be able to go down for hours and not impact internal productivity too much. Others might grind operations to a halt.

Consider what needs to be available without notice – which workloads would benefit from redundancies? Where could added coverage help provide reliability for your team and build trust with external stakeholders? While it may not seem “optimized” to add in redundancies, think of it as getting focused. You’re bolstering what you need the most and not overdoing it on the workloads that aren’t as vital.

Performance

Reliability doesn’t mean much if performance suffers. However, there are numerous techniques you can use to optimize cloud performance, such as:

• Implementing autoscaling services: Autoscaling enables companies to scale up and scale back resources on demand to enhance cloud performance. Public cloud providers, including AWS and Microsoft Azure, offer scheduled load balancing and autoscaling capabilities
• Selecting the right instances: It’s important to provision instances with the right characteristics to fit your workload’s resource needs. Many cloud providers offer a multitude of instance types to choose from, including cloud instances optimized specifically for in-depth compute workloads and applications that require more memory
• Using a microservice: Microservice architecture can be a fast and efficient way to manage cloud-based applications. These services divide apps into interrelated programs that can be deployed, scaled, and managed individually

Security

Security vulnerabilities put your entire organization in jeopardy. Even a small opportunity to exploit the environment can lead to widespread problems, but when you lack visibility on your environment, it can make this task exceedingly difficult. Cloud optimization should include an approach to security that aims for a one-pointed, centralized view of your infrastructure. Seeing more at a glance allows you to improve prevention and reaction times.

Benefits of cloud optimization services

Public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure can be overwhelming to the initiated. Working with a managed cloud service provider can solve your organizational headaches and achieve a meaningful ROI.

Strategic consulting

Cloud optimization is a multi-pronged process. To get the most out of it, you need to know which levers you can pull for a continuously balanced plan. TierPoint has seen it all. Our strategic consulting provides clients with a high-level understanding of their environments and what they can do to optimize accordingly.

Cost optimization

From this strategic consultation, TierPoint’s experts can make suggestions on license adjustments, allocation, and overall cloud setup that will be focused on cost efficiencies. Should your business move to all “as a service” models? Is there room for legacy systems? Cost optimization can help you figure that out.

Managed hybrid cloud services

When you’re trying to figure out how the cloud looks for your business, it’s important to work with a provider who can give you a complete picture of your options. We provide a holistic approach focused on putting together the best roadmap that can lead you to optimized cloud success.

Understanding usage

Data can’t work for you unless you put it to work. We take the time to understand your usage by looking at your data and making informed decisions that won’t put performance or productivity on the chopping block. Once we know your baseline usage and where you want to go, we can make educated suggestions about what to add next.

How TierPoint can help optimize your cloud resources

Both workforce shortages and a need for more specialized IT talent have made it hard for all organizations to secure the in-house expertise they need.

Instead of hiring one or two specialized team members, TierPoint allows you to have a team of experts at your disposal who can provide niche advisory and consulting services that get to the core of your business needs. Reach out today and see how you can boost performance, maximize budgets, and keep your workloads safe with our cloud optimization advisory & consulting services.