With over 90% of businesses prioritising cloud optimisation, there’s a clear struggle to offset cloud costs while still benefiting from the digital transformation boom.
Luckily, striking the right balance between manageable cloud costs and optimal performance is far from impossible. Getting started, however, means understanding exactly what’s up for grabs – and what’s at stake.
Understanding Costs in the Cloud
The scope of cloud costs can be daunting, covering everything from storage to the running of solutions such as Copilot. Costs in the cloud can also vary by different storage and network needs, and some cloud costs are more obvious than others.
To break it down, let’s consider the main components of cloud costs, including:
Compute: Cloud providers typically offer various compute instance types, each with specific allocations of CPU resources, memory, and, sometimes, specialised hardware like high-speed networking or graphics acceleration. Customers are charged based on the number and type of instances they use, as well as the duration for which they are used.
Networking: Cloud services generally charge customers based on the amount of data transferred into (ingress) or out of (egress) the cloud. Additional fees may apply for virtualised network services such as static IP addresses, load balancers, and gateways.
Storage: Storage is provided as a service by cloud providers. For elastic storage services, customers are billed based on the amount of storage they actually use. In the case of managed storage – like managed disks attached to compute instances – customers pay for the entire storage volume, regardless of how much of it is utilised.
Making for a more challenging scenario, there are other costs not listed above that are more difficult to spot without the ability to review bills, optimise resources, and identify security issues.
Defining Performance in the Cloud
When it comes to performance in the cloud, we need to first inspect what’s ‘good’ – and then figure out how we achieve it.
Quality: One of the most important elements of optimal cloud performance is making sure that your cloud storage is of the highest quality possible – ensuring that virtual machines and attached block storage volumes operate efficiently, while managed storage services deliver reliable, consistent performance for users, partners, and customers.
Speed: Another important aspect to consider is processing speed. Fast processing speeds can be achieved through both vertical and horizontal scaling. This ensures efficiency and more productive processes.
Security: Additionally, a strong emphasis on security ensures that data and operations are protected, contributing to a dependable cloud environment.
But when it comes to balancing costs and performance, sacrificing one for the other opens the door to missed optimisation opportunities, limited results, and untapped potential. Better performance and lower costs don’t necessarily need to be opposing goals either; if one suffers, a lot of the time the other one will too.
So how can you maximise performance while making savings?
Achieving the Best of Both Worlds
A great way you can achieve both low costs and high performance is by implementing a FinOps structure and using a cloud optimisation platform like Surveil.
A FinOps structure will help you manage your business cloud spend by maximising the value of the cloud through timely data-driven decision making and increasing collaboration between business teams.
Meanwhile, Surveil works hand-in-hand with the FinOps approach, providing near real-time visibility into your cloud usage to identify problem areas in your structure that could be draining costs. By pinpointing overprovisions or underutilised resources, Surveil can help optimise both your cost and performance further, through advanced insights informed by unique analytics.
Ultimately – although sometimes tricky – achieving balanced success in the cloud and the overheads isn’t impossible. With the right tools, analytics, and insights, you’d be surprised at just how achievable it is to keep your cloud costs low and cloud performance sky high. So, what are you waiting for?
Intrigued? Get in touch to find out more about how Surveil can perfectly balance cost and performance in your cloud space today.
