Courtesy COVID – 19, enterprises are frantically shifting their workloads to the cloud to ensure business continuity. As a result, cloud is becoming the primary location for businesses to not only store data but also move their applications to become digital-native. Companies across industries are modernizing their IT infrastructure to leverage new-age applications and advanced analytics. However, if not managed well, cloud infrastructure can fall short of meeting the intense storage and computing demands of modern enterprises. Hence, it is advisable for enterprises to closely monitor their cloud resources and optimize wherever necessary.
Enterprises can implement the following solutions to gain maximum returns out of their cloud investment:
A deeper understanding of the cloud strategy – As with any technology strategy, the entire organization must be clear about what the cloud deployment will entail, and what is needed from the cloud service provider. To attain maximum benefits from cloud, it is vital that employees at all levels understand the cloud model and its usage.
Schedule instances – A key feature of running instances on the cloud is that enterprises only pay for the resources they use. Production systems tend to run 24/7, however, some instances in development or test environments are typically used only during business hours. Keeping them running in the middle of the night or on weekends serves no useful purpose, so turning them off saves money. However, stopping and starting large groups of instances manually every day can be very tedious. Hence, most cloud providers offer features that allow enterprises to configure “custom start and stop” for instances. This feature enables enterprises to make the maximum use of cloud’s scalability and pay for only what they use.
Better Negotiation with Cloud Service Providers – One way to enhance cloud investments is to understand if the current licenses and annual maintenance contracts with existing OEMs can be utilized. With better negotiation, enterprises can cut cost-effective deals with their service providers by optimizing existing licenses and spends. When applied across the enterprise IT landscape, this can result in huge cost savings not only across procurement of Cloud subscriptions but also in terms of efforts and time spent by the IT teams to ensure seamless transformation to Cloud.

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Also Read: Cloud Adoption – Do organizations have a choice?
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Use Cloud Management Platform – There is no denying that cloud infrastructure offers plethora of benefits such as flexibility, agility, optimized cost and security. However, in most scenarios, organizations lack in-house skills and adequate staffing to seamlessly manage disparate tools and technologies. Hence, it is advisable to use cloud management platform to incorporate self-service interfaces, provision system images, enable metering and billing, and attain some degree of workload optimization through established policies. A good cloud management platform allows users to maintain control over dynamic and scalable cloud environments.
Make use of next-generation edge-cloud ecosystem – Edge or distributed cloud computing has great potential to help enterprises improve content delivery, enable extreme low-latency use cases and meet stringent legal requirements on data security and privacy. They offer solutions to host different kinds of platforms and provide a higher level of flexibility for application developers. This form of cloud computing pushes the data processing power out to the end-user devices rather than centralizing compute and storage in single data center. This reduces latency and network congestion, resulting in not only improved response time but also overall efficiency.