Cutting the cost of consumption during Covid-19

Cutting the cost of consumption during Covid-19

In any challenging climate cost control quickly becomes an important agenda for executive leadership teams. The current Covid-19 crisis has resulted in many businesses needing to reduce costs across their IT platforms. This includes slashing IT budgets and operational costs including cloud. This has proved to be quite difficult with many struggling with complex billing and limited budget verification. With cloud spend increasing daily you could potentially be exposed to unnecessary overspend. It is easy to consume cloud services without realising the financial impact.

Nasstar will help you at no cost, to identify areas where you can cut costs across your Azure platform. By moving your Azure Subscription to Modality’s CSP we can optimise your cloud expenditure and identify resources that can be cross charged internally. We will deliver lower costs, and the ability to move rapidly to take advantage of opportunities without over-provisioning.

Based on Nasstar’s direct experience, there are three core elements to effectively managing cloud costs:

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It is key to have an optimisation strategy with a clear aim to constantly look to reduce your costs or control the resources deployed.

Gartner analysts have confirmed what we continuously see; companies waste up to 75% of their cloud budget in the first 12-18 months of implementing Cloud services. I have identified three areas to initially focus on to deliver those instant cost savings:

Assess and rationalise

  1. Simplify your subscriptions – obtain visibility and assign ownership or remove unnecessary subscriptions
  2. Turn off non-production or non-critical virtual machines when they are not in use
  3. Stop any premium services
  4. Identify and delete any orphan-managed disks
  5. Reduce the load servers by using CDN or caching services

On demand

  1. Autoscale where possible
  2. Power scheduling – auto shutdown or autostart
  3. Storage optimisation
  4. Optimise data transfers – only deploy to other regions if your service needs to

Right-sizing for your needs

  1. Azure Cosmos DB
  2. Services pooling & Service resizing
  3. VM resizing & Disk resizing
  4. Choose Spot VMs for low priority workloads

Implementing the above optimisations will save you up to 50% across your Azure platform over the next couple of weeks. Customers that move their Azure and O365 Tenants and Subscriptions to the Nasstar CSP are provided with an online self-service portal. This allows you to see continuous cost impacts and what has been deployed. Nasstar will further enhance your experience by implementing the free Azure Lighthouse service.

There are numerous other ways that savings can be realised over the long term to achieve even greater cost savings:

Advanced optimising

  1. Implement Azure Hybrid Benefit and Azure Reserved Instances
  2. Shift workloads to AKS
  3. Migrate databases from VM to PaaS & SaaS where possible
  4. Implement Azure Dev Test Labs instead of Dev Subscriptions

Contact Nasstar now for a no obligation discussion on how we can help you reduce costs in Azure.