3 Cost Optimization Initiatives You Might Have Forgotten About

It’s always important to be sure that you’re only spending when you need to, especially in IT, where expenses can skyrocket quickly. But this year especially, you’ve got to be certain that you are getting cost optimization initiatives off the ground in every area you can.

3 Must-Do Cost Optimization Initiatives:

1. Right-size cloud spend

   Cloud offers a lot of possibilities. It can increase agility as well as save you money on hardware expenses. Many businesses have moved operations into the cloud, thinking it’d automatically cut costs. But that hasn’t always been the case. Without careful attention, it risks becoming a major culprit of wasted IT spend. Analyzing how much cloud capacity you actually need combined with ongoing rightsizing can significantly reduce cloud costs. A simplified (but admittedly quick) lift and shift migration of workloads has caused them to run inefficiently. If you recognize this, you’ll have the potential for significant savings on your cloud bill.

2. Predict Resource Needs

   Not knowing that the servers underpinning your services will be overloaded and cause an outage in 3 months means you can’t prevent it. Instead, you’re left cleaning up damaged customer relationships, spending unexpectedly to get services back up and running, and allocating valuable experts to fight the fires instead of working on real improvements. Other projects will suffer, and you’ll be anything but on budget. By accurately predicting resource needs, you can meet a spike in demand without bring your system to its knees. And when the demand goes back down, you can repurpose those resources to cover for other spikes and minimize waste.

3. Life-cycle Management

   IT services don’t last forever. As time goes by, the conditions under which your services are running will change. Changes in your business processes can change the demand for the service or even make it redundant. Changes or innovations in technology can have similar effects. This makes it important to apply a life-cycle approach to resource optimization, bringing attention to the changing circumstances and how to address them. This is extra important in dev/test environments, where the lifespan of an initiative is even more limited. Without it, you risk ending up with substantial resources tied up in dormant services or long-gone projects.

While these cost optimization initiatives aren’t all low-hanging fruit, they will have a significant impact on your IT budget and help you to meet business needs without being a cost center.