Is your business overpaying for the cloud?

Ask anyone who has adopted cloud services why and they'll likely mention the costs. Often the primary driver for attracting organizations to cloud, cost and value are the metrics by which businesses evaluate hosting and cloud services.

Yet, according to 451 Research, 75% of surveyed businesses indicate that budget and cost is either a moderate or significant impediment to their use of cloud. So what is getting in the way of businesses effectively extracting cost benefit from the cloud platform? If you believe your organization is overpaying for cloud, or not getting the value you expected, keep reading for an understanding of how to solve your cloud cost issues.

The right environment for the workload

First, if you aren't benefiting from the elasticity of a cloud, there may be a more cost effective environment for a more predictable workload. Selecting the right cloud platform that matches the required service level agreement, uptime, performance level, compliance and security standards is crucial to determining your optimal spend.

Second, optimizing cloud platforms is a pretty complex task and an area in which skill gaps abound. Identifying the workloads, putting them in the right place, controlling server sprawl and configuring correctly can create enormous differences in the cost.

Areas of Potential Savings

One tactic for cost control is using reserved instances. This method allows you to commit to a certain amount of resources for a specific amount of time.  The 451 Research Cloud Pricing Index indicates that currently committing to reserved instances, or the equivalent, can produce savings of around 30% versus using pure utility.

Improper capacity planning ...