| |DECEMBER 20219that were previously unimaginable. Today, almost all organizations are fo-cused on how to improve their capacity to harness and store data. In this tryst, most organizations go on storing copi-ous amounts of data, not all of which is needed.Many organizations, for example, store all incoming data. To avoid clut-tering up their internal data center, they transfer the unused data to the cloud. This data can keep adding up and contribute to costs that can be completely avoided. Organizations also have to evalu-ate their disaster recovery strategy. They have to devise measures to man-age snapshot lifecycle and set the right lifecycle policies so that the snapshots keep piling up and over time end up eating a lot of storage space and there-by keep cloud data storage costs under check. Monitoring the data in the cloud, evaluating what data is needed or can be valuable in the future, and getting Monitoring the data in the cloud, eval-uating what data is needed or can be valuable in the future, and getting rid of what is not needed can reduce, and consequently optimize, cloud spend. APPLICATIONS THAT ARE NOT CLOUD-OPTIMIZED To get applications to the market quickly, organizations need to remove the operational complexity of the app to the platform. Cloud-optimized ap-plications are a response to this grow-ing need and give organizations the agility they need to survive in this competitive marketplace. Organizations need to focus on op-timizing applications by refactoring to improve performance. It can help them avoid charges associated with ac-cessing storage for a read or write and make sure that costs don't overshoot the advantage matrix. Determining the optimal compute levels, storage, and memory needs of the applica-tion also eliminates wastage emerg-ing from overspending on capacity or configuration. Identifying the service level pro-files of the applications to balance ser-vice levels with default cloud instances and evaluating the cost of cloud in-stances against service levels required for different applications drive optimi-zation. Fine-tuning auto-scaling rules and database row optimization are also important when optimizing appli-cations for the cloud to drive efficien-cies of performance and finances. APPLICATION DESIGN CONSIDERATIONSPaying close attention to the applica-tion design and making sure that the same is optimized for the cloud goes a long way in controlling cloud costs. Cloud applications have to be designed differently and have to carefully con-sider the design forms. Instead of cre-ating a big design up-front and provid-ing a full allocation of resources, it is more prudent to design them keeping horizontal scalability in mind. During this phase, it is also wiser to under-pro-vision and then scale up according to requirement rather than provision for peak loads upfront.Cloud costs can also be checked by deeply understanding how each factor impacts the price of each resource. Or-ganizations need to consider elements like tiered storage classes, provisioned IOPS, burst compute, Lambda/Func-tions, etc. to bring in the optimization of costs.INCORRECT CLOUD CHOICES 'Which is the cheapest cloud service?' This question is similar to asking a doctor 'is this case serious?' Incorrect cloud choices, determined solely by the lowest price can impact the RoI negatively simply because the solu-tion might not be the right one for the organization.The choice of the right cloud de-pends on which cloud service the orga-nization will use and how often and ac-cording to the needs of the application such as availability, scalability, perfor-mance and compliance needs, etc. IN CONCLUSION While one of the biggest draws of the cloud is lower costs, the cloud is not free. Neither is it cheap. However, by making the right cloud choices and managing the cloud well organiza-tions can control their cloud costs easily and get a faster RoI. This road might feel like it is peppered with some bumps, but such bumps are common, even normal, especially for a mas-sively disruptive technology like the cloud which has turned our world over completely. identifying unused resources and removing these resources from the cloud help in keeping the cloud bills down. Sandboxing the environment to ensure that compute instances are cleaned up or shut down when they are no longer in use also is an important step
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