Over the years public cloud has given a way to curb data center expenditures for organizations of all sizes. While the pay-as-you-go model of cloud computing brings significant opportunities for savings, it also requires new approach to minimize waste and optimize spending. In the absence of advanced planning these anticipated cost savings can become a huge expense for any firm to manage if left unchecked.
Following are few tips for a CEO to be aware when reviewing organization’s public cloud budget with his/her tech leadership:
- Ensure clear business outcomes and KPIs are defined by the tech leadership using value-to-spend analysis.
- Make sure your CTO has presented you with a clear public cloud strategy that is based on workload dependencies rather than focusing solely on usage and capacity patterns.
- Cost of services that best meet organization’s needs and budget are calculated using the cost calculator offered by the public cloud provider.
- Make sure the tech team has the expertise to develop applications specifically for the cloud. Leveraging cloud-native services and optimization initiatives can quickly achieve desired efficiencies.
- Services should be provisioned using auto-scaling services. Auto-scaling can automatically adjust capacity to maintain steady, predictable performance at the lowest possible cost.
- Prepaid discounts for reserved instances should be included in the budget. This option provides considerable savings, particularly if capacity is known or it can be accurately predicted.
- There should not be any cost for unused instances.
The above-mentioned controls sand efficiencies can be handled by the internal tech team or by a managed services provider who can help optimize and manage the cloud spending and efficiently provision your cloud resources.
CEO Tech Tips 