Businesses are increasingly concerned about rising cloud costs but the solution is not to cut cloud services, it’s about cost efficiency.
A multi-cloud approach whereby you combine two or more public cloud services from separate vendors is a viable solution. Rather than being ‘locked in’ to a single cloud vendor, you deploy certain workloads such as data storage through one provider, and others such as software development or web hosting through another.
This can streamline your cloud spending by enabling you to deploy the most suitable and cost-efficient solution to each workload within your infrastructure, for example, you can launch multiple servers across a number of different cloud hosting plans and infrastructure providers to ensure you get the best value.
“An additional concern might be excessive spending on surplus cloud resources, as this can incur unnecessary costs and introduce operational inefficiencies,” said Aaqib Gadit, co-founder, Cloudways. “One advantage of a public cloud infrastructure is that you can regularly review and adjust how you consume cloud resources so you’re using them as efficiently as possible — any resources which are underused or redundant can be downgraded or terminated as required, while any which are insufficient can be increased.”
Most vendors charge on a pay-as-you-use basis using post-billing, which means that while costs can be variable, you’ll never be charged for resources you haven’t used. To maximise efficiency, check your cloud providers’ billing schedules and closely monitor monthly usage to ensure you’re getting maximum value in the areas you actually need it.
“Scalability is also key as it’s essential to adopt a cloud infrastructure which can adapt as your business grows and your requirements evolve,” said Gadit. “In a complex environment that utilises dedicated server resources alongside private and public cloud services, scalability can be resource-intensive, costly, and operationally disruptive, since you’ll need to commit to significant system upgrades and maintenance.
“Leaning mainly on a public cloud model, however, affords your business the luxury of on-demand scalability, meaning it can be agile in the face of shifting business demands. For instance, if your website or business applications experience a sudden surge in traffic, a hosting provider will enable you to scale resources such as RAM, CPU and storage quickly and efficiently, minimizing the risk of downtime or loss of performance. “
There’s also the issue of data security, privacy, and legal compliance. To ensure data security in the first instance, it’s essential to control access to data, whether at rest or in transit, and validate the data at the point of entry. Ensure that you have properly configured access and identity management protocols in place when it comes to dat, and encrypt all enterprise data and applications during the migration phase.
It’s also important to enable versioning and logging in order to preserve, retrieve and restore data in the event of a security failure. Versioning means that the business can restore data from a previous version of the application, while logging provides a trackable audit trail of security-related incidents. Finally, ensure you have multi-factor authentication (MFA) in place to introduce multiple layers of access control.
