How To

Reducing Cloud Costs: A Roadmap to Efficient Expenditure

Cost optimization is an inherent part of running an IT operation and a business as a whole. Yet, reducing cloud costs is a whole beast unto itself, with complexity running rampant in many distributed enterprise cloud deployments across the industry. The solution lies in a simple approach: a clear roadmap tailored to maximize efficiency, leveraging capabilities of a comprehensive cloud platform.

Key Takeaways:

Lowering cloud costs is necessary for keeping business running, spurring innovation, and reducing cloud waste.
Optimizing expenditures in the cloud means capitalizing on the best cloud services, building a flexible hybrid cloud, and thoughtfully scaling the multicloud environment.
Keeping expenses in check for the long run requires smart spending practices built upon intelligent operations and an emphasis on cost governance.

The importance of reducing cloud costs

According to estimates from Gartner, worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services grew to nearly $600 billion in 2023. This figure itself is staggering, but the main takeaway is that many individual organizations are experiencing out-of-hand cloud costs.

Reduced cloud waste
Lower carbon footprint
Less risk of provisioning excessive resources
Improved time-to-market
Greater speed of innovation

Cloud cost control contributes to efficient expenditure on a company-wide scale, fueling success, growth, and possibly even a better customer experience. When decision-makers have a transparent and easy-to-understand view of spending across the entire organization, there is little ambiguity as to what is and is not financially possible.

It is important to note that reducing cloud costs does not have to mean compromising on innovation. With the right tools, a productive mindset, and an exceptional cloud platform, it is entirely possible to let the best ideas flourish freely while still maintaining a highly efficient spending pattern in the ever-evolving cloud landscape.

Optimizing expenditure in the hybrid cloud

Moving some or all of an organization’s IT processes to the public cloud allows it to tap into vast cloud computing resources. The hybrid cloud, on the other hand, is a combination of public and private cloud infrastructures that allows decision-makers to strategically place workloads in the optimal location in terms of control and efficiency.

Cloud services are a natural part of any financially conscious hybrid cloud strategy. Implementing on-demand services from a third-party provider removes much of the hardware and personnel burden from one’s own organization, which translates to cost savings and unfettered access through a pay-as-you-go model.

In addition to adopting the hybrid cloud, many organizations are also operating in a multicloud environment that provides maximum versatility through the diversification of cloud providers. Shifting to hybrid and multicloud, either respectively or in tandem, enables cost-cutting in the form of new capabilities and cloud-smart possibilities.

Interestingly, reducing cloud costs is a matter that extends to IT realms outside the hybrid cloud itself. Improving IT efficiency as a whole is necessary for optimizing expenditure in the hybrid cloud. This entails reducing datacenter costs, which is a notable benefit of hyperconverged infrastructure that boost the consistency and efficiency of the IT stack by compiling the datacenter into a much more manageable and energy-efficient package.

Spending smart with Nutanix

Cost control in the cloud is ultimately a matter of governance and financial accountability, both things that a comprehensive platform will support as built-in features. Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) provides simple multicloud management that facilitates smart spending through intelligent operations, self-service, and automation.

Cost Governance is an aspect of the NCM tool that optimizes spending with intelligent resource sizing and accurate visibility into cloud metering and chargeback. Visibility and control are core tenets behind the design philosophy of the Nutanix Cloud Manager, meaning that IT teams in the Nutanix environment have everything they need to maintain financial accountability.

NCM Cost Governance Test Drives demonstrate the solution’s capability for reducing cloud costs in action. A free test available to all prospective users can demonstrate the following:

Mapping resources to cost centers and business units
Quickly identifying and eliminating underutilized cloud resources
Full costing transparency beyond hardware and software fees

Minimizing IT costs will continue to be an ongoing endeavor and a top priority as the work landscape continues to evolve well into the future. The right cloud platform takes a future-proof approach, tackling the issue from a smart and thoughtful position. With Nutanix, this means saving money starting at the datacenter level and looking beyond the private cloud to the hybrid or multicloud landscape, where innovations happen every day.

The Nutanix roadmap for reducing cloud costs

Achieving efficient expenditure on a company-wide scale is not an all-at-once endeavor. With Nutanix, business leaders can plot a roadmap that an organization can painlessly and effectively follow for the months and years ahead.

This roadmap navigates IT teams through Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) and all its built-in solutions for optimizing cloud expenses. NCP unifies cloud operations and makes smart spending possible with one-click simplicity.

Contact us today to submit inquiries, request support, and take the first steps toward creating your cost control roadmap. Reducing cloud costs in a meaningful way is something that is absolutely within your grasp.

Learn more about cost saving with HCI and other ways to rethink cloud workloads with cost control in mind.

“The Nutanix “how-to” info blog series is intended to educate and inform Nutanix users and anyone looking to expand their knowledge of cloud infrastructure and related topics. This series focuses on key topics, issues, and technologies around enterprise cloud, cloud security, infrastructure migration, virtualization, Kubernetes, etc. For information on specific Nutanix products and features, visit here.”