4 Steps to Optimize Your Cloud Savings

You may have heard about the cloud myths currently floating around, including the claim that the cloud doesn’t save companies money. And that claim isn’t necessarily false.

Some organizations overlook or fail to get the right cloud savings best practices into place, and subsequently lose out on significant savings opportunities. Fortunately, you can avoid these mistakes with the right planning and strategy. And it’s a worthy pursuit because if you’re successful, the cloud can save you money by letting you:

• Reduce Your Hardware & Fully Utilize What’s Left
• Less Demanding Labor and Maintenance (you can save over 15% in IT time spending alone)
• Increase Flexibility and Mobility
• Boost Your Productivity (organizations that moved to the cloud saved $2.8M through increased end-user productivity alone)
• Take Advantage of Easier, Faster, Less Expensive Software Installations
• Reduce Your Power, Space, and Environmental Footprint
• Raise Your Scalability
• Cash In on a Lower Initial Capital Investment (organizations that moved to the Hyland Cloud avoided over $500k in capital expenditure costs within three years)

Here are four of the most powerful actions you need must take to optimize your savings according to cloud best practices.

4 Best Practices to Optimize Your Cloud Savings

1. Optimize First

Cloud providers offer appealing discounts in hopes of winning your business quickly. However, your savings will be drastically reduced if you lock in these discounts before eliminating unnecessary resources. You might be surprised by how much data you’re holding onto that’s not worth paying for. As a result, don’t lock into cloud provider discounts until you:

• Eliminate redundant or idle resources
• Deprovision unused storage
• Rightsize resources
• Identify waste in PaaS services that can be discontinued

2. Migrate in Phases

Unfortunately, many organizations fail to sufficiently plan for their cloud migrations and move too quickly, leaving room for configuration errors and other issues. This mistake can lead to catastrophic delays that can grind your business operations to a costly screeching halt.

Instead, you should phase your migration. Start by moving non-essential data to the cloud. Take your time to ensure configurations are correct and everything has migrated properly. Then, you migrate the rest of your data with greater confidence. This phased approach ensures both a smoother transition and prevents significant delays. As a result, business can continue as usual since employees will still be able to access the data they need for nearly the entire migration period.

Your experienced digital transformation partner will also be able to help make the transition as smooth as possible by helping you plan your migration phases. And if you currently lack the bandwidth or skilled workers to devote adequate time to cloud planning and migration, you may want to consider managed services. Their cloud experts can collaborate with your team to accelerate your move to the cloud or take over it entirely.

3. Focus on Software Licenses

The expenses behind traditional software licenses for certain applications can be extremely complex yet account for a large portion of cloud costs. As a result, it’s worth the time to track all bring-your-own-license scenarios in the cloud and identify savings opportunities. Be aware some software licenses can be more expensive to run certain cloud platforms due to their license restrictions, making it essential to evaluate the associated cost projections and choose your ideal route from there.

4. Prioritize Ongoing Strategic Management

Cloud costs can spiral out of control without the right management in place. Even after optimizing your resources, your organization may have a plethora of underused, oversimplified, or pricey cloud resources that could fly under the radar until the bill arrives. To combat this issue, prioritize ongoing cloud cost optimization in your cloud strategy. This way, your cloud solution will have a cross-functional team of finance and technical roles watching over it. These employees will have the skills, tools, and accountability to examine their ongoing cloud resources and costs. As a result, you can optimize your cloud costs while enjoying all the other cloud benefits.

While the cloud can bring significant savings, it doesn’t do so inherently. You need the right strategic focus throughout your cloud journey, from planning and migration to ongoing management.

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