Why is cloud cost optimization a business priority?

For businesses leveraging cloud technology, cost optimizations should be a priority. Cloud computing helps organizations boost flexibility, increase agility, improve performance, and provide ongoing cost optimization and scalability opportunities. Users of cloud service providers like Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure should understand the ways to cloud cost optimization. This article will discuss why cloud cost optimization should be a business priority.

What is cloud cost optimization?

Cloud cost optimization reduces the overall cloud expense by right-sizing computing services, identifying mismanaged resources, reserving capacity for high discounts, and eliminating waste. It provides ways to execute applications in the cloud, leveraging cloud services cost-efficiently and providing value to businesses at the lowest possible cost. Cost optimization should be a priority for every organization as it helps maximize business benefits by optimizing their cloud spending.

Here are some of the most common reasons cloud cost optimization is a business priority:

1. Rightsize the computing resources efficiently

AWS cloud support and many other cloud providers offer various instance types suited for different workloads. AWS offers savings plans and reserved instances, allowing users to pay upfront and thus reduce cost. Azure has reserved user discounts, and Google Cloud Platform provides committed user discounts. There are multiple cases where application managers and developers choose incorrect instance sizes and suboptimal instance families, leading to oversized instances. Make sure your company chooses the proper cloud storage that aligns well and is the right fit based on your business requirements.

2. Improves employee’s productivity and performance

When engineers or developers do not need to deal with many features to optimize, they can easily focus on their primary role. Implementing cloud cost optimization can free up the DevOps teams from constantly putting out fires, taking much of their time. Cloud optimization lets you spend most of the time and skills on the right task to mitigate risks and ensure that your services and applications perform well in the cloud.

3. Provides deep insights and visibility

A robust cloud cost optimization strategy affects the overall business performance by bringing more visibility. Cloud expenditures are structured and monitored efficiently to detect unused resources and scale the cost ratio for your business. Cloud cost optimization discovers the underutilized features, resources, and mismanaged tools. Deep insights and visibility reduce unnecessary cloud costs while optimizing cloud utilization. Cloud cost optimization does reduce not only price but also balances cost and performance.

4. Allocate budget efficiently

Cloud cost optimization eliminates the significant roadblocks, such as untagged costs, shared resources, etc. It gives a cohesive view and accurate information about business units, cost centers, products, and roles. It becomes easier for organizations to map their budget and resources accurately with complete financial information. It gives businesses the power to analyze billing data and the ability to charge back by managing resources efficiently.

5. Best practices implementation

Cloud cost optimization provides businesses to apply best practices, such as security, visibility, and accountability. A good cloud optimization process allows organizations to reduce resource wastage, identify risks, plan future strategies efficiently, reduce spending on the cloud, and forecast costs and resource requirements.

Final words

Cloud cost optimization is not a process that can happen overnight. However, it can be introduced and optimized over time. Cloud computing has a lot of potentials, but organizations should pay attention to cost optimization to take full advantage. It’s not a complicated task but requires a disciplined approach to establish good rightsizing habits and drive insights and action using analytics to lower cloud costs.

Enterprises can control expenses, implement good governance, and stay competitive by prioritizing Cloud cost optimization. Cloud costs must be viewed as more than just a cost to be managed. A good cloud cost strategy allows firms to better plan for the future and estimate cost and resource requirements.

Protected Harbor is one of the US’s top IT and cloud services providers. It partners with businesses and provides improved flexibility, productivity, scalability, and cost-control with uncompromised security. Our dedicated team of IT experts takes pride in delivering unique solutions for your satisfaction. We know the cloud is the future. We work with companies to get them there without the hassle; contact us today, move to the cloud.

Why Are Cloud Services Taking Over?

With the rising popularity of cloud services, many businesses are migrating to create their remote servers. There are many reasons you might choose cloud services over setting up your hardware, but all business owners should consider simple economics.

The days when businesses had to rely on the availability, provision, and ability to have huge spaces to run their operations are long gone. The world has evolved, and startups are flourishing because they are facilitated. No office turns into a small space, then eventually into a vast building rapidly. What enables all of this is the Cloud.

One benefit of this is that you can use several tools and features to protect your data from intruders and hackers who might otherwise gain access to any information stored on your primary server. Cloud storage space is often much cheaper than in-house. Cloud Services are taking over due for a plethoric number of reasons. Henceforth let us have a look at them in detail.

Improved Storage and Convenient Backup

Storage is provided to businesses through massive servers contained in the Cloud. Therefore, companies do not need to rent out prominent places to hold their servers or buy such servers. Then, there is also the presence of excellent backups since the Cloud service providers have their backup servers and are responsible for it. It is their job to back things up and not the businesses’. This also leads to a drastic improvement in its performance to its clients.

Scalability, Flexibility, and Performance

In an excellent turn of events for businesses, Cloud Technology has been designed to be scaled to match the alternating IT requirements of companies. Therefore, as a company grows, it is evident that more storage space and bandwidth will be required to keep up with the ever-increasing traffic on its applications, websites, and other services. So, to accommodate the re-scaling of companies and ensure optimum performance under heavy loads, Cloud servers can be deployed automatically. This also improves speed and minimizes downtime of web applications, amongst many others.

Cost-Efficiency

As we have seen above, the lack of required space and servers significantly reduces the running costs through Cloud services. Overhead costs related to software updates, server hardware updates, and server management also reduce this. Another thing that facilitates this decrease in operational expenses is that Cloud services can be used on a pay-per-use basis. As a result, businesses can utilize the same benefits they want and guarantee a return on their investments.

Lack of Responsibility Towards Malware Attacks and Data Protection

The data of businesses fall under the responsibility of the Cloud service provider. At face value, it may seem unsafe since another company has access to your business’s data. However, this is far from reality.

Your business data is kept secure due to exceptionally well-rounded and dexterously designed contracts, with accentuation given to even the tiniest details. Therefore, once a malware attack comes into motion, your business is not the liable party; it is the company acting as the Cloud service provider.

This opens the doors to many advantages. When a malware attack occurs, a business utilizing a Cloud service can go on its merry way and continue focusing on improving its services. At the back-end, the Cloud service provider will take care of removing the actual malware.

• Automatic Software Updates

Through automatic software updates, Cloud service providers can ensure that whatever issue caused a breach can be covered. Since the business software at play is running on the Cloud servers, the provider can step in seamlessly to remove the malware.

• Automatic Software Integration

Once a newer methodology to prevent malware attacks or data leakages rolls out, the new feature will be distributed to all users using the business service, whether in an application or a website. Again, the business’ service is running on the Cloud service provider’s server, so one updation in the Cloud servers updates the distributed version for all users.

There is no reliance on each hardware component needing to be updated in a company since all its workers and users will be incorporating software that runs on the Cloud.

In the case of a backup failure, there is no need to worry since a Cloud service has multiple backups. For any business, creating such backups will prove to be tedious, overwhelming, and perhaps even out of reach to manage on-premises.

Similarly, covering up is a headache for the Cloud service provider when there is data leakage. For a business, it will be business as usual, as they say.

Business Continuation

There is always that element of risk involved when it comes to businesses. Unforeseen circumstances could cause a company to go bankrupt, and if it is based entirely on the Cloud, it may never be able to recover. This is because it has to sell all its offices, which would entail the servers present and all the other equipment when there is a lack of finances. A sophisticated backup may not be present in data loss situations since it is expensive and likely to be located on the same site. Therefore, all company data might be lost when a natural disaster occurs.

This is where Cloud service providers kick in, whether a business disaster or a natural disaster. A business can go online and remote if it is forced to sell all its offices due to financial constraints, thus reducing its costs instead of firing its employees or shutting down. There is simply no issue in case of data corruption or loss since Cloud service providers are both experienced and can provide multiple reliable backups.

The above results in the continuity of a business even under challenging times and situations.

Conclusion

All the reasons mentioned above make it imperative for a business to desire to incorporate Cloud services to accomplish its endeavors and run its operations. Since the entire world runs on companies, whether small or large, Cloud services are taking over!

Businesses are moving to cloud-based services because it makes their security and management more effortless. Since all data is stored on remote servers, there’s less risk of data theft or loss, which is a massive benefit for any company. Going with a private cloud service also means that you only have to pay for what you use, saving you money in the long run.

If you’re still on the fence about a move to the cloud, consider all of its benefits, then move to a cloud service provider or an MSP. From accessibility to cost savings, the cloud is an essential business tool that can help streamline practically every aspect of your business. Now is the time to upgrade to a private cloud.

The private cloud by Protected Harbor is more than just a backup solution. It improves the speed and efficiency of your business by providing flexibility, cost control, and enhanced security. With its multi-tenant design, you have access to all the advantages of a cloud solution without the risk of compromising security or performance. And with the ability to interconnect with the public cloud, you can take advantage of cost-effective solutions whenever they are available. Please take the next step to upgrade; contact.

The importance of owning your remote servers and using a dedicated protected cloud.

If you’re a business owner, then there’s a good chance this question must have crossed your mind to own your equipment and servers. Just remember, “owning” your equipment doesn’t mean the computers and systems in your office. Likely, you are already using a hosting web service or server for your business needs. After carefully considering your unique business needs, it would be best if you decided between onsite or off-site servers. Read along, and we’ll make the decision easy for you.

Onsite servers to Off-site servers; The trend

In 2021 more than 50% of the organizations moved their workloads to off-site or cloud servers. Managed service companies (MSPs) and value-added resellers (VARs) are gaining traction with their one size fits all solutions. Keeping an onsite physical server and equipment and maintaining the infrastructure is costly. But there are other reasons motivating businesses to move to an off-site setting.

• Onsite hosting has limited connectivity and accessibility than off-site hosting, which has unlimited capabilities.
• Remote and geographic expansion are more realistic in an off-site and cloud environment.
• The physical space of onsite housing servers incurs real estate and energy charges; off-site servers do not.
• Storing your data in a colocation datacenter is cost-effective, removing the need for in-house IT costs.
• The upfront costs of the physical equipment and server are significant for most businesses.

These technology barrier costs are causing the shift to datacenter solutions or dedicated off-site servers. Put, a datacenter solution or dedicated server is an option dedicated solely to your business needs and purposes. No other individual can access the server; it’s your data in our datacenter.

A closer look at AWS servers

The most popular dedicated off-site solution is Amazon web services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platforms. But how do you choose what’s best for your business? They all follow the pay-per-user approach and additional services and products needed over time, adding to costs as you grow.

Since AWS dominates the field, we will focus on just Amazon’s platform. The first thing to consider is that “You want solutions, not a platform.” For example, Office365 is a solution to edit and create documents, while Microsoft Azure is the cloud platform that hosts 365 and other programs online. Thus Amazon is a platform – not a solution. Amazon gives you cloud space for rent, with unpredictable costs as your business needs rise and fall.

You will not see an automatic performance improvement when you move your company’s workflow and applications into AWS. For that, you would need a dedicated protected-cloud environment and an intelligent, distributed database. Just hosting your applications on AWS does not mean you will have the ability to use those programs and computing resources efficiently. You have to meet AWS system requirements; AWS does not have to meet yours. If you want data backups and recovery, you have to do it yourself.

With AWS, Azure, and other popular server options, you only get a Virtual Machine (VM) and a console to work from. It is your responsibility to manage, maintain, and secure that VM. For example, with AWS, someone has to customize the CPU utilization limits, check to ensure the Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume doesn’t hit the IOPS or throughput limits, and increase your read or write performance using parallelization. It sounds like more of a problem than a solution

Also, it has been proven that AWS cloud is not as secure as your datacenter. The world JUST experienced an AWS outage, interrupting the operations for thousands of people and loss of business downright. Not only do you lose flexibility and cost-effective scalability with AWS and Azure. But you lose the reliability and stability you thought you were getting with the Amazon and Microsoft name.

The bottom line is if you work with GPU, AI, or large data sets, you need someone to manage and personalize your IT infrastructure. Moving to a dedicated protected cloud solution lets you customize the server environment to improve AWS.

What is the alternative?

With a dedicated protected cloud, someone constantly monitors your private environment to make sure everything goes smoothly and is customized to the company’s requirements. Actual IT management means knowing when to optimize the storage and network layers to support your extensive data set. Unlike AWS and Azure who will slow down your traffic moving between VM’s –unless you pay additional fees – we can help optimize applications to respond to requests made to these large data sets in a remote environment, with no extra cost.

Before anything, we always have an expert examine the applications a business uses, how exactly employees use those applications in a daily workflow and finally review the data loads involved to figure out what needs to be done to make this run properly. Having a team that understands and develops personalized Technology Improvement Plans (TIP) gets your business more bang for the buck than AWS or on-prem.

This is the gist of overall performance, Bottom line? You want to opt for a service that offers 99.99% uptime with reliable IT support. We improve the environment to give you the best performance for your workload. Not the opposite way around. For example, for a single client, we don’t have to tune the S2D. But we do because we have it and want to give them the best performance possible.

Check out our post on how dedicated servers are a safer alternative. But that doesn’t mean you are 100% safe from attackers. To ensure the safety of the data, consider providers with built-in features like Application Outage Avoidance (AOA) and complete network monitoring to handle issues before they are critical…

So, despite all of the above facts, if you’re still crazy enough to go with AWS cloud, that’s your decision. Irrespectively, if you’re not terrified by the lower and fixed price complete solution, best infrastructure setup and system monitoring, or our team doing the magic for your business, in that case, we at Protected Harbor will be more than happy to give you all the solutions you need.

Virtualization vs cloud computing

Cloud computing and virtualization are both technologies that were developed to maximize the use of computing resources while reducing the cost of those resources. They are also mentioned frequently when discussing high availability and redundancy. While it is not uncommon to hear people discuss them interchangeably; they are very different approaches to solving the problem of maximizing the use of available resources. They differ in many ways and that also leads to some important considerations when selecting between the two.

Virtualization: More Servers on the Same Hardware

It used to be that if you needed more computing power for an application, you had to purchase additional hardware. Redundancy systems were based on having duplicate hardware sitting in standby mode in case something should fail. The problem was that as CPUs grew more powerful and had more than one core, a lot of computing resources were going unused. This obviously costs companies a great deal of money. Enter virtualization. Simply stated, virtualization is a technique that allows you to run more than one server on the same hardware. Typically, one server is the host server and controls the access to the physical server’s resources. One or more virtual servers then run within containers provided by the host server. The container is transparent to the virtual server so the operating system does not need to be aware of the virtual environment. This allows the server to be consolidated which reduces hardware costs. Less physical servers also mean less power which further reduces cost. Most virtualization systems allow the virtual servers to be easily moved from one physical host to another. This makes it very simple for system administrators to reconfigure the servers based on resource demand or to move a virtual server from a failing physical node. Virtualization helps reduce complexity by reducing the number of physical hosts but it still involves purchasing servers and software and maintaining your infrastructure. Its greatest benefit is reducing the cost of that infrastructure for companies by maximizing the usage of the physical resources.

Cloud Computing: Measured Resources, Pay for What You Use

While virtualization may be used to provide cloud computing, cloud computing is quite different from virtualization. Cloud computing may look like virtualization because it appears that your application is running on a virtual server detached from any reliance or connection to a single physical host. And they are similar in that fashion. However, cloud computing can be better described as a service where virtualization is part of physical infrastructure.

Cloud computing grew out of the concept of utility computing. Essentially, utility computing was the belief that computing resources and hardware would become a commodity to the point that companies would purchase computing resources from a central pool and pay only for the number of CPU cycles, RAM, storage and bandwidth that they used. These resources would be metered to allow pay for what you use model much like you buy electricity from the electric company. This is how it became known as utility computing. It is common for cloud computing to be distributed across many servers. This provides redundancy, high availability and even geographic redundancy. This also makes cloud computing very flexible.

It is easy to add resources to your application. You just use them, just like you just use the electricity when you need it. Cloud computing has been designed with scalability in mind. The biggest drawback of cloud computing is that, of course, you do not control the servers. Your data is out there in the cloud and you have to trust the provider that it is safe. Many cloud computing services offer SLAs that promise to deliver a level of service and safety but it is critical to read the fine print. A failure of the cloud service could result in a loss of your data.

A practical comparison (Virtualization vs CLOUD COMPUTING)

VIRTUALIZATION

Virtualization is a technology that allows you to create multiple simulated environments or dedicated resources from a single, physical hardware system. Software called a hypervisor connects directly to that hardware and allows you to split 1 system into separate, distinct, and secure environments known as virtual machines (VMs). These VMs rely on the hypervisor’s ability to separate the machine’s resources from the hardware and distribute them appropriately.

CLOUD COMPUTING

Cloud computing is a set of principles and approaches to deliver compute, network, and storage infrastructure resources, services, platforms, and applications to users on-demand across any network. These infrastructure resources, services, and applications are sourced from clouds, which are pools of virtual resources orchestrated by management and automation software so they can be accessed by users on-demand through self-service portals supported by automatic scaling and dynamic resource allocation.