Many businesses waste money because they don’t know how to fix cloud overload, leading to high costs and slow performance.
Using too many cloud services without control can hurt your business.
In this blog, you will learn smart ways to fix cloud overload, cut unnecessary costs, and keep your cloud usage efficient—so your business saves money and runs smoothly every day.
What Causes Cloud Overload?
Cloud overload occurs when organizations excessively consume cloud services without the proper planning, resulting in unnecessary expenditure and inefficiencies.
This overload is often due to several common mistakes. Duplicate apps, untrimmed storage, and inefficient resource allocation all hit costs rapidly, as well as make cloud operations complex.
Recognizing these reasons is the beginning of addressing cloud overload and reclaiming your cloud environment. Following are the core reasons fuelling the cloud overload in most of the enterprises.
Too Many Redundant Applications
Cloud overload primarily stems from multiple applications working towards the same goal. Independent adoption of tools by departments creates overlapping services that waste both resources and budget.
In the absence of regular audits, these duplicate apps stack up, resulting in increased subscription costs and unnecessary complexity. Efficient app usage reduces wastage and increases productivity.
Poorly Managed Cloud Storage
Cloud storage that is uncontrolled can rapidly become a cost driver hidden in plain sight. Businesses tend to keep outdated, redundant, and irrelevant data, resulting in inflated storage costs. In the absence of regular cleanups or appropriate data management policies, cloud storage grows in an uncontrolled fashion, hurting your budget.
Well recommended practices for storage optimization are the best way to pay less and still have your data structured and secure.
Inefficient Resource Allocation
Cloud overload is often due to either over-provisioning resources or not adjusting capacity according to demand. Businesses could be paying for computing power, servers or storage they seldom used. This leads to wasteful spending if left untracked.
Monitoring and reviewing resource utilization regularly guarantees that you have the right amount of cloud capacity in place for the things you truly need to be running, saving you from paying for resources that you will never truly make use of.
How to Do the Cloud the Right Way!
It is organic to optimize after an initial adoption phase. With a strategy in place, the cloud can provide the ultimate productivity without becoming a massive headache.
Here’s advice on how to bring your cloud usage under control to save money and stay competitive.
Consolidate Your Cloud Tools
Perhaps one of the most effective methods for cutting costs, simplifying security, and lessening your users’ learning curve is to utilize cloud platforms that house multiple applications within a single platform.
Such solutions include Microsoft 365, enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools as well as CRM suites like Zendesk. Because they include several different tools in one “umbrella,” these platforms can streamline and save costs in several ways.
- You eliminate duplicate efforts across your applications
- End-users become familiar with one core interface that’s uniform across all the apps
- Subscriptions costs will usually be far less than the cost of subscribing to the same tools individually
- Data integration is out of the box, so workflows are smoother and manual entries are reduced.
Survey Users on Your Apps
Do you have an app that you feel is ‘can’t live without’, but your end-users find cumbersome? Many cloud app decisions are formulated in the conference room instead of the break room.
Survey your users on all the different cloud apps they are users of, what they would keep, what’s useful, what’s not.
They’re going to be the people most informed about the advantages or disadvantages of a particular app because they’re using them every day.
Ask an Expert What Others are Using
This is one of the benefits of working with an IT service provider (like RCOR); they will have a wealth of knowledge about what companies out there are using productivity tools.
That knowledge can be invaluable when you’re crafting a cloud strategy; they’ll know immediately if something is a good value or whether other businesses in your industry have run into trouble with a certain cloud tool.
Regularly Review Your Cloud Subscriptions
If you’re not paying attention to your cloud subscriptions, you could easily end up spending more money than you need to.
Let’s say, for instance, that you upgraded to the “premium” plan of an app because it included one feature that the less-expensive “basic” plan didn’t provide.
A year later, that cloud service may have overhauled their plans and now that one feature is included with the basic plan. But if you’re not paying attention, you could overpay for years.
Conduct an annual review of your cloud subscriptions and consider these questions:
- Does our plan still meet our needs?
- Is there a competitor providing a better value?
- Are users logins cancelled for past employees?
- How do workers feel about this app?
Put an Application Approval Process in Place
One reason companies find themselves suffering from what is known as cloud overload is because employees start using apps before getting permission. This is known as shadow IT, and can lead to inflated cloud costs and security challenges.
Employees may begin using cloud apps in a benign enough way, simply to fill a gap that an existing application does not. But that creates issues, because these apps are unvetted and outside of your overall cloud strategy.
Capture shadow IT and enjoy the added bonus of getting user ideas at the same time by implementing a cloud app approval process that ensures employees must submit an app for approval prior to using it. Best Practices for Optimizing Cloud Cost
The most important part of cloud usage is optimizing the costs. Without the right strategies, such as sprinkling that data with some common sense, businesses can easily overspend on unused resources, redundant apps, and oversized infrastructure.
Cloud cost optimization ensures you pay only for what you need while keeping the performance needed. Here are tried-and-true best practices for lowering your cloud costs without sacrificing efficiency.
Best Practices for Cloud Cost Optimization
The most important part of cloud usage is optimizing the costs. Without the right strategies, such as sprinkling that data with some common sense, businesses can easily overspend on unused resources, redundant apps, and oversized infrastructure.
Cloud cost optimization ensures you pay only for what you need while keeping the performance needed. Here are tried-and-true best practices for lowering your cloud costs without sacrificing efficiency.
Implement Auto-Scaling for Cloud Resources
Auto-scaling ensures that resource consumption in the cloud is consistent with live demand. Rather than always paying for maximum capacity, auto-scaling automatically increases or decreases computing power during peak or lean times. This minimizes over-provisioning and helps contain costs through performance scaling up or down based on traffic spikes or workload surges.
Monitor Usage & Eliminate Unused Resources
Regular cloud usage monitoring is essential in order to identify the unused resources that are attacking your budget. Many companies overlook shutting down virtual machines, storage, or test environments that are not in use. Audit your cloud usage and remove what you no longer need to spend less and run more efficiently in the cloud.
Use Cloud Cost Management Tools
Cloud cost management tools give you insight into how much you are spending in the cloud and how your if you are allocating cloud resources effectively. Tools such as AWS Cost Explorer or Azure Cost Management provide you with granular information so that you can view costs, set budgets, and forecast future spend. Using these tools you will be able to make data-driven decisions and avoid the surprise cloud bill.
