Have you ever heard the phrase, “Too much of a good thing becomes a bad thing?” Well, there’s a hint of truth to this, especially in the business world. Just because your cloud solution allows your business to store a huge amount of data in the cloud, doesn’t mean that you are getting the best return-on-investment. In fact, you might just be unknowingly wasting resources that would be better used elsewhere.
This “cloud waste” is more common than you might suspect. This happens when your organization consumes more cloud resources than it actually needs to. Business 2 Community outlines several of the most common ways that cloud waste can become apparent.
- Instances or VMs which are left running, chewing up $/CPU-Hr costs and network charges
- Orphaned volumes (volumes not attached to any servers), which are not being used and incurring monthly $/GB charges
- Old snapshots of those or other volumes
- Old, out-of-date machine images
Keep in mind that the major thing to remember about waste is that it’s almost always preventable. In this particular case, cloud waste can damage the bottom line of your organization. More than just your return on investment, it also diminishes return on equity and net revenue.
Cloud waste even hurts the bottom lines of the cloud providers, specifically because they are most profitable when they oversubscribe their data centers. If cloud providers can’t oversubscribe, they then build more data centers, which is too expensive to yield any significant return-on-investment. While this may not immediately be a problem for consumers, it can potentially become one. Most notably, a profit-minded business may choose to supplement this decrease in income by increasing the overall price of their product or service, which means that consumers will wind up paying more in the long run than they would if basic cloud waste best practices were adhered to.
Therefore, it’s in everyone’s best interest if cloud waste is mitigated. Furthermore, you should be planning to avoid it during the implementation process. This often involves a second opinion from a trusted technician or IT provider, but the average SMB might not have in-house professionals who are trained to look for this type of issue. Often times, a fresh pair of eyes and a new outlook might be just enough to resolve your cloud waste issue. To this end, Aspire would be happy to help. To learn more, reach out to us at (469) 7-ASPIRE.
