By Rajesh Thadhani, Executive Director, Digital Transformation and Services, Crayon Software Experts
It is no doubt that migrating to the cloud is not just a trend. It is here to stay. Today, many businesses have either already begun migrating or are under pressure of doing so. With this transition, however, many are discovering unexpected expenses and are exceeding their budget. Crayon examines the cloud migration, identifies the explanations for these unwanted expenses, and analyses how Cloud usage analysis can also create a culture of accountability ensuring ROI on your cloud spend.
What is happening under cover
The cloud itself is a collection of computing services accessed through the web. The cloud provides access to tools and resources for easy scaling and adaptability. This is often great for speed and innovation but has completely changed the way finance and procurement would look at budgeting. Cloud migration moves physical workloads, IT resources, and applications from on-premise to the cloud environments.
Before boarding this journey to the cloud, every company should first consider how to leverage the cloud strategies that is cost-effective. Paying attention to cloud economics is critical, cloud consumptions forecasting can directly impact bottom lines.
A step back to understand what migration strategies include:
Rehost: This sort of migration is as is ‘lift and shift’ moves your current on-premises assets on to the cloud as is. The model has its limitations as some may require re-architecting for compatibility with the new environment. Keeping everything as is during the migration also can mean forgoing additional cloud functionality. Having said that, this method is great for moving straightforward assets that do not need any alterations but is a risk to software compliance with respect to license mobility.
Replatform: While Rehost does not use any advantages of the Cloud other than migrating to the cloud. Re-platforming, with some additional re architecting supports cloud infrastructure optimisation. The assets in the new cloud environment can now scale, automate and update infrastructure as required, thereby saving you costs.
Refactoring: We rebuild digital assets from scratch by replacing the old assets with new cloud-native ones. While refactoring is exhaustive process, it needs to be done very systematically by experts. And of courses, some applications need to be rebuilt using cloud technologies for optimum use.
Some tips for those who have already moved and need to optimise costs:
- Delete disk storage if it has been unattached for two weeks, as it is unlikely the same storage will be used again.
- Set a standardised policy in your organisation for the number of snapshots or images to be retained per object and for how long. Note, a recovery occurs from the most recent snapshot.
- Check to shut down VMs that have a max CPU < 5 per cent over the past 30 days, it is worth investigating.
- VMs that have an average CPU < 5 per cent and max CPU < 20 per cent for 30 days are a good place to start rightsizing or termination.
- Analysis has revealed that upgrading VMs to the latest generation saves millions of dollars per year.
- Premium storage is billed based on the total disk size, regardless of consumption or use. Keep a close eye on utilisation of premium storage to minimize wasted cost.
- For further cost savings, organisations can opt for the standard availability model and local redundancy.
- There could be greater cost savings by leveraging reservations combined with the Azure Hybrid Benefit, this allows you to leverage your existing on-premise Windows Server and SQL Server licenses in Azure.
- Set targets for weekly hours of running non-production systems. A planned target of example, less than 80 hours per week, could save you thousands of dollars per month.
- Convert any hot tier objects older than 30 days to a cool tier.
