The Main Challenge In Cloud Computing And The Way To Tackle It

The cloud computing technology keeps evolving in ways you might not have thought possible years before. This would particularly be true if you closely monitor industry white papers and analyst reports.

For instance, the yearly customer survey of Flexera suggests a notable transformation in how businesses consider cloud challenges nowadays. Comparing the results from 4 years ago to 2020’s outputs proves that there exist shifting priorities regarding cloud strategy. In 2016, the main challenge was associated with an expertise/resource gap. The priorities that come after the shifting ones were compliance and security problems. The cost was peripheral to other priorities, and despite that, it applied to just those at more matured levels.

One of today’s main cloud initiatives is cost management in all except for the latest cloud adopters. It is interesting that security appears to have exited the list of top five cloud initiatives. Governance may be a factor even today, but it appears to be disappearing. The leading concern among entities is cost optimization.

Customer anecdotes and analyst reports make it clear that there is a lot of confusion among companies regarding optimization and minimizing cloud waste. There are several tools that aid in simplifying cost management and visibility, but cloud waste expands when infrastructure evolves.

More resources have been invested in governance and security issues. These are real challenges that companies should handle. Anyhow, achieving cost optimization will aid in freeing up more money to handle these issues.

Eliminating Waste: The Primary Step In Cloud-Related Cost Optimization

What is the reason for the process of optimizing cloud costs being very important? It is because a lot of expense is basically a waste, without any advantage to users and any pain when needless resources are removed. Earlier in 2020, about $18 billion was approximated to be wasted by this year. Much of that waste will come from the following factors.

• Idle resources, which mean the resources that companies pay for on a per-second, per-minute, and hourly basis, only to not use these. Generally, these involve non-manufacturing resources supplied for product development, cloud server staging, testing, plus quality assurance which tend to be utilized in a workweek of 40 hours. The resources remain unused for the total number of hours in a week, although these are billed even today.
• Overprovisioned infrastructure,which results in paying for cloud resources that go beyond the requirement in terms of capacity. Around 40% of cloud instances are bigger than the normal size. Companies can cut down costs by 50% through the reduction in a cloud instance by a single size.

Some of the other common origins of waste are inefficient containerization, underused sets of data, orphaned volumes, cloud instances that run on legacy-type resources, and unutilized reserved instances.

The Way To Handle Cost Optimization

The key to making the best possible use of cloud costs is reducing waste. But in what way can you make everybody in a company think in the same fashion? The best way to achieve it is by adapting an easily useable self-service cloud computing platform for every enterprise elements including engineers, finance, developers, and DevOps. Ultimately, individual program owners own the expenses that their teams incur, plus they require the power to decide how their resources are handled.

The lone priority of program owners who tend to lack the bandwidth for evaluating solutions does not cost. The team of cloud operations will not only manage a platform, but they will also have it enable the program owners to take action on the basis of its recommendations.

Considering the present environment, a new demand for inexpensive, and multi-cloud management tools is likely to occur. Companies will have to deploy these tools across C-suite executives, operations, and engineering, for undisrupted access to a self-service cloud platform. With the ongoing concerns regarding cloud cost, these tools are likely to be part of daily cloud operations.