The Cloud Conundrum – Managing Costs and Improving Performance with AIOps
The cloud is a must for digital transformation across enterprises. However, with the emergence of multiple cloud environments, technology experts are trying to navigate through the conundrum of these complex cloud environments.
According to the 2023 Cloud Complexity report, 98% of technology executives believe their enterprises have been impacted by the growing complexity of cloud-powered data. This complexity is leading to adverse consequences like poor performance, cost escalation, loss of revenues, and performance barriers.
In today’s uncertain economic times, 85% of SMEs and startups believe their cloud investments can prepare their businesses for the future. This is true; however, 56% of technology leaders expect their cloud spending to increase in 2023.
But why are cloud costs spiraling out of control? How can organizations streamline their cloud expenses and complexities? Let’s answer these questions in the following sections.
Why Are Cloud Costs Going Out of Control?
Anodot 2021 State of Cloud report
According to Gartner, 4 in 5 CEOs are investing more in digital technologies to reduce their business costs and increase profitability. However, 59% of them feel digital transformation is progressing too slowly, while 52% believe technology-based solutions take too long to deliver business value.
The 2021 State of Cloud report by Anodot revealed that the 2020 pandemic accelerated the shift toward the cloud. Over 90% of the survey respondents said they have moved their IT infrastructure to the cloud – while 60% are in the process of migrating their workloads to the cloud platform. In the initial phase, companies do face high cloud server costs, which can impact business viability.
Additionally, 6 in 10 CIOs say their IT teams are overloaded with the growing complexities of technology stacks. As cloud workloads have increased, companies are spending 3 to 5 times more to re-engineer or re-architect their enterprise applications like CRM for the cloud platform.
Here are some of the reasons why cloud bills are getting inflated:
- Lack of visibility into the usage of cloud resources, which can impact the management of the cloud budget
- Overprovisioning of cloud resources, which can result in cloud waste
- Fragmentation of cloud assets across business teams and vendors
Efficient cloud management requires a balance between the pace of workload migration and cost control. Effectively, cloud cost management is all about the following four elements:
- Visibility
- Insights
- Recommendations
- Automation
Organizations need to leverage AI technology to optimize their cloud environments and reduce their cloud costs and complexities. Let’s see how in the next section.
How AIOps Can Streamline Cloud Cost and Performance
Short for Artificial Intelligence for IT operations, AIOps applies AI capabilities like machine learning and natural language processing to automate and streamline IT operations and workflows.
How does AIOps help streamline the complexities of cloud management? Here are some of its possible use cases pertaining to the cloud environment:
1. Cloud Cost Optimization
Organizations find it easy to run their workloads on the cloud. However, they find it challenging to run their cloud workloads while optimizing for costs. Most of the available cloud management tools need manual configuration – along with proper tagging of cloud resources.
Through automation, AIOps provides real-time insights into cloud costs. With intelligent recommendations, AIOps tools can accurately detect the areas where companies are overspending. For instance, AIOps can automatically migrate an overprovisioned cloud instance to a lower-cost instance.
2. Optimizing the Cloud IT Infrastructure
Optimized cloud infrastructure is critical to business success. As the cloud infrastructure grows exponentially, organizations face a steep increase in their cloud bill. To control their cloud costs, organizations introduce tagging policies and monitoring.
Continuous automation in the form of AIOps can help in constant cloud savings. For instance, it can automatically “turn off” application instances (during the weekends) and then “turn on” the instances at the start of every week.
3. Planning the Cloud Architecture
Technology teams have a host of cloud services to choose from. Each service has varying configuration settings based on the workload. IT teams often have to answer the following questions when planning for the right cloud architecture:
- Which application will perform efficiently when deployed to a virtual machine, serverless framework, or container?
- Which cloud region will deliver the best results for a particular workload?
Using predictive analytics, AIOps tools can accurately predict the best configuration for any given workload. AIOps tools can also make accurate recommendations based on workload requirements – and the cost and performance of the cloud architecture.
4. Ensuring Compliance with Cloud Security
Enterprises must also ensure that every provisioned cloud resource has the right security configuration to comply with industry regulations. This requires real-time monitoring of cloud security so that the cloud user can shut down machines in the event of non-compliance.
With AIOps, organizations can implement a continuous monitoring mechanism that automatically detects and resolves security vulnerabilities. This enables companies to stay compliant without any impact on their cloud performance.
Conclusion
As cloud workloads get larger, enterprises have to deal with the rising costs and complexities of their cloud environment. Favorably, AIOps can automate the process of simplifying cloud management, thus controlling both costs and performance.
As the brainchild of Avekshaa Technologies, appNeura provides end-to-end actionable insights with its AIOps-based Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) solution. At appNeura, we can re-engineer or re-architect your cloud application for improved efficiency, scalability, lower latency, and resource utilization.
Are you looking to optimize the costs and performance of your cloud workloads? Let us help. Contact us today.