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Cost savings have been one of the biggest drivers pushing companies to adopt a cloud data infrastructure in recent years.
As IT teams have been focused on building data cloud solutions that provide a seamless customer experience, you might not be tracking the overall impact on the budget. Now, with Covid19 pushing companies to reduce expenses, this is a good time to review your cloud cost optimization to see if you’re operating as efficiently as possible. Here are five quick and easy ways to further reduce your costs in your existing Microsoft Azure environment.
Do a Cost Analysis
A cloud cost analysis of Azure will help you identify the resources you are using and provide recommendations on how to best budget for those resources. Are you paying for a virtual machine that you use every day, but is set up for pay-as-you-go? If your usage has increased in the last year, you could see considerable savings from purchasing a virtual machine on an annual basis. Microsoft estimates the cost savings of an annual Azure Reserved VM Instance could be up to 72% over pay-as-you-go with Azure RIs or 80% with Azure RIs + Hybrid Benefit.
Monitor Data Warehouse Usage
Many IT organizations host a multi-tiered environment, including development, quality assurance, and production environments. Review your environments for peak operating times. As most IT professionals know, production needs to be available at 99.99% to 99.999% of the time. But do the data warehouse units need to run at DWU1000c the entire time? Could you reduce the number of DWUc used during non-peak times to save money? Do you need to keep your development and quality assurance environments available when the development and quality assurance teams are not working? When you pause a data warehouse, you are not charged for having it in your resource group.
Check Your Storage Requirements
Microsoft recently began offering Azure Managed Disks for use with your Virtual Machines. This lets your organization choose what type of managed disks you want to use based on size and performance characteristics. By reviewing your requirements alongside Microsoft’s pricing details, you can decide if Premium Solid State Drive (SSD) storage is required or if all you need is a Standard SSD.
Compare Your Projects to Your Resource Groups
We live in a world where multiple projects run at the same time. Does each project really need to create its own resource group? Or could your organization use resources from other groups to accomplish the same goal? For example, say one project team creates a virtual machine to set up an Integration Runtime service to connect environmental resources. If you have another recently launched project without a virtual machine that requires connectivity to the same environmental resources, could they share the same machine?
Delete Unused or Failing Resources
Each resource available in Azure has costs associated with it. Consider deleting resources to save money if a fund is not being utilized or has been failing for the past two months. It can always be recreated and put back into production if needed. Perform an audit of the resources in your environment regularly to help identify items that can be deleted.
Whether you are looking to optimize your cloud environment or to save money, the above tips will help streamline and reduce costs. Use Microsoft’s built-in tools to help identify cost savings in your environment.
CoStrategix is a Microsoft Gold Cloud Platform partner, and a Silver Data Analytics partner. Whether you’re looking to optimize your technology architecture, build or modernize a cloud-native app, or leverage the cloud for data and analytics, we can help you plan for a solution that will achieve your business goals and execute the solution in an agile fashion.