Companies and home users in recent times have had to adapt to a new way of working. The change towards an increasingly digital and online world has caused it. Therefore, companies face challenges such as cloud migration, remote work, choosing their cloud type, and more. Ten years ago, when companies began to migrate their data and storage to the cloud from their own servers located in the workplace, the task was easier. The reason was because they had a single cloud provider with billing based on full capacity along with network egress fees. In this article we are going to learn how to control cloud storage costs.
Current trend
Although many companies still have a cloud provider with an invoice, a couple of items and a payment, things are changing. In 2021 we are seeing a trend to use multi-cloud or hybrid cloud to optimize various workloads. Thus, by 2022 cloud service providers in all areas, not just storage, are preparing for multi-cloud and hybrid cloud systems.
Asset management tools
When it comes to controlling cloud storage costs, you need to determine exactly what applications and data your company stores in the cloud. The first thing we need to do is audit the entire organization and identify all active cloud accounts. Thus, thanks to this information we can begin to reduce cloud storage costs.
One report found that there is an average of 50% involving shadow IT spend, including storage. In that regard, companies can have hundreds or thousands of cloud accounts that run outside of IT. This means they have no visibility into usage and organizations have a security risk in addition to costing money.
Storage and performance requirements
If we need to store petabytes of data, we will surely be interested in doing a price research on some services such as Google Cloud, Oracle or VMware clouds, we should also compare prices on Amazon Web Services and even Microsoft Azure. For small businesses with storage requirements at the terabyte level or less, in some cases, a local provider may be the best option. You also have to compare capacity-based costs and network egress rates for the types of storage workloads you expect to deploy.
Another thing to keep in mind is that once we have decided on a cloud provider, then over time changing it becomes more difficult. The reason is that workers get trained and familiar with that cloud service and its protocols, and then habits are hard to change. On the other hand, a good AI-powered storage analytics platform, while expensive, can be a smart investment in the long run.
Cloud service providers offer levels of performance to meet the varying needs of an organization. If we want to reduce storage costs in the cloud, by reducing storage costs we can monitor the actual read and write access of a specific volume. If we can work well with a lower volume, we can go down to a lower performance level. Thus, depending on the volume, they can result in significant savings of between 25 or 30% per year.
Plan data access and output
At the time we make a move to extract files, records or other data from a cloud service we have to pay for that service. That is why it is necessary to calculate how often per month or year we will need to access our stored files and make a budget in which we will also take into account unforeseen events. In addition, you have to know how to estimate the time it will take for our cloud service to execute our order. In that aspect there can be many variations and a good provider will be able to execute our request the same day.
Data deduplication and backup
In case you don’t know, deduplication is a process that eliminates additional copies of data, saving a large amount of storage space. Whenever a match occurs, the redundant fragment is replaced with a small reference pointing to the stored location. If we want to reduce cloud storage costs, administrators must deduplicate all company data before migrating it to the cloud.
Also, to save cloud storage costs, we should only back up only the data that is related to the company’s business. Therefore, workers should not back up photos and videos from their smartphones to the company cloud. Finally, here are some tips so that our data in the cloud is not stolen.
