Concerned About Cloud Expenditure? – Introducing Cloud Cost Optimisation by Spherica

Cloud expenditure can get out of hand for a variety of reasons, some of these include:

Poor Cloud Spending Management

As cloud services accrue over time some organisations struggle to keep track of and govern the platforms and deployments in their cloud estate. Without proper oversight it can be hard to spot opportunities for rationalization, resulting in bloated cloud expenditure.

Poor Understanding of Cloud Pricing Models

The notion that cloud computing services are charged based on usage is only true up to a point. Providers use a variety of pricing mechanism across their service offerings, with service tiers and discounts adding further complication. The result is a web of pricing structures that can be difficult to navigate for the uninitiated, often leading to overspend and inefficient resource use.

Underuse of Cost Optimisation Tools

Cloud service providers usually offer features to help users lean-down their cloud spending. Microsoft Azure’s cost management and billing tool for example provides analytics and resource optimisation recommendations to help users manage their deployments cost-efficiently. However, some organisations fail to exploit these features often due to lack of awareness or understanding of their capabilities.

Overprovisioning

Overprovisioning is a common cause of cloud overspend that occurs for a variety of reasons. Organisations often overestimate resource requirements and fail to re-evaluate usage against capacity on an ongoing basis. Sometimes fear of service disruption plays a role, with businesses concerned that lean provisioning might lead to service outages at peak usage times. Occasionally, a cloud service provider will fail to provide convenient access to real-time resource usage data, leading to overprovisioning as a precautionary measure.

Lack of Strategic Planning

Many organisations rush headlong into cloud adoption, giving little thought to the strategic value of new cloud assets and how they complement existing services. This can lead to superfluous or underutilized services that present a significant cost burden.

Vendor Lock-in

Vendor lock-in occurs when circumstances arise (contractual or otherwise) that make it cost prohibitive for an organisation to migrate to a cheaper product or service. Contract prices rises with no get out clause, hidden charges and poor interoperability that makes it costly to migrate, are some of the ways vendor lock-in can prove costly.

Here at Spherica, we want to help businesses achieve the best possible cost-benefit ratio from their cloud assets. That’s why we’ve launched our Cloud Cost Optimisation Service (CCOS): a systematic review process designed to help organisations do more with their cloud solutions for less money.

Our engineers combine decades of experience in cloud computing, and our partnerships with leading cloud service providers (including Microsoft and AWS) ensure we know exactly how much you should be paying for your solutions. Through diligent planning, the service is designed to be low impact and operate to a fixed schedule, meaning it won’t affect your operations. At its conclusion your business will gain a detailed report outlining key opportunities for cost saving through the streamlining and restructuring of your cloud estate.

One of our engineers will be assigned your case, and will be responsible for initiating the assessment process in your environment. A remote connection to your cloud solutions will be established so that we can examine your services and infrastructure and their interplay with your business processes. This is a non-invasive process that won’t affect your IT operations, with remote contact made in just 3 instances. The process will begin with an induction call, followed by three follow-ups, and concluded with a final call summarising the main findings of the report.

The process concludes with the compilation of the final report. This will emphasize key areas of resource misspend and set out proposals for rectification.

The main objective of the service is to help your business rationalise, realign and streamline your cloud services with a view to saving money. We’ll do that by highlighting underused and dormant services, services that in our experience represent poor value for money, solutions that are in conflict with your business’s objectives, resources that are overprovisioned and service charges that seem uncharacteristically high. Our GAP analysis will compare your license costs and rolling subscription charges against costs representative of businesses of your scale operating in your sector. With our extensive experience helping countless businesses migrate to the cloud we are ideally placed to offer a strategic, objective insight into how your costs compare to those of comparator organisations.

In addition to its main findings, the report will also feature a no-obligation cost estimate for issue rectification. Just as with the cloud cost optimisation service, rectification will be a non-intrusive process that won’t interfere with the day-to-day running of your IT.

Over time, it’s natural for cloud services and infrastructure to fall out of alignment with a business’s workflows and objectives. Spherica’s Cloud Cost Optimisation service is an investment in the long-term cost efficiency of your IT that will help you reset your cloud environment in line with your business’s strategic goals.