4 Cloud-computing Costs and How to Manage Them in 2020

2020 trends show us cloud computing will continue to increase productivity and drive innovation for organizations of all sizes long into the future. These benefits, along with others, such as trading capital expense for variable expense and reducing hardware expenditures, are only the beginning to the cloud’s positive impacts.
However, operating in the cloud is fundamentally different than with an on-premises environment. This means it also comes with a whole different set of cost-management details that can lead to disaster if not properly addressed. These include server virtual machine instances, storage, network traffic, software licenses and other specifics.
Leveraging the certified expertise of an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Select Consulting Partner, like Protelligent®, can help you effectively manage these 4 cloud-computing costs, wherever you are in the process.

1. 1. Pre-Purchase Base Capacity
      Taking advantage of discounts is always a good thing. One such discount is the pre-purchasing of base capacity expected to be utilized for one or more years. This is much more cost-friendly compared to On-Demand instance pricing. Our AWS architects are experts at navigating the discount arena when building, migrating and managing your cloud environment to maximize your savings.
   2. Asset Utilization
      Ensuring the efficiency of cloud assets is one of the most important parts of managing costs. Zombie servers, orphan services and gluttons are three examples of assets that have little or no use, yet still cost money. Without constant monitoring, these non-performers can easily ratchet up monthly cloud bills anywhere between 20 and 40 percent. Making matters worse, locating them is neither simple nor automatic, particularly when managing multiple clouds with multiple accounts each.

Fortunately, our ManagedIT Complete™ service can provide the necessary visibility to optimize cloud assets, it also provides end-to-end support for your entire IT environment. This saves you time and money, while helping you focus on more important things, such as innovation.

1. 1. Resource Tagging
      Whether you’re working with a managed IT service provider or directly with a cloud provider, staying on top of usage and costs means resources must be tagged with the right details. This is the only way to efficiently pinpoint those that are underutilized, so they can be shut down, downsized or set to run on a schedule. Protelligent’s exceptional breadth and depth of certified AWS cloud knowledge not only takes the guess work out of keeping these costs in check, but also allows you to quickly adapt cloud resources to fit your needs on any given day.
   2. Administrative Controls
      One of the keys to successful migration and utilization is a top-down culture shift. Everyone across the company must understand the fundamental differences between cloud computing and on-premises environments to prevent small, but costly mistakes.

In a traditional on-premises environment, companies purchase equipment up front, use it as needed and have limited additional expense. Cloud services are the exact opposite. If a virtual machine is inadvertently left running over the weekend with no one using it, this wasted consumption is billed at a normal rate. Another example is hardware purchases. When new on-premises equipment is needed, a purchase order must go through various channels for approval before it can be acquired. In the cloud, it only takes a few minutes for anyone with access to build something, creating additional and unapproved expense that no one may even know about without proper resource tagging.

Avoiding the sticker shock of these common scenarios requires certified know-how. Protelligent’s AWS architects can help you through the process of assigning user-access rights, roles and user-specific responsibilities across your cloud environment to deliver the best control.
Creating and enforcing resource-access policies is another set of administrative controls that will work to protect data for stronger security and compliance. We can also help with managing the culture change to your people and processes through detailed planning and constant communication to cover all the bases.

The good news is relying on AWS experts, like Protelligent, can give you a serious competitive advantage by ensuring your migration and utilization are optimized more efficiently and effectively. Contact us now at (855) PRO-TELL and get the confidence you need to increase productivity and create new revenue streams in the cloud.