Why Capacity Management Is Essential to Controlling Cloud Costs

Amazon Web Services. Google Cloud. Microsoft Azure. Private clouds. There’s certainly a dizzying array of options for where to develop, run, store and manage your most critical applications and data.

So, it’s no surprise that most organizations primarily focus on which clouds to move to and what the total cost is for their public and/or private clouds. But to stay competitive in today’s digital business landscape, organizations must shift their focus to how they’ll effectively control their costs once they’ve moved to the cloud.

The Pressing Need for Capacity Management That Works

It’s clear that most IT organizations don’t have the right resources or insight to comprehensively identify what infrastructure resources are needed or how to forecast their respective costs. Additionally, with multiple buyers of cloud services throughout the organization, IT and business owners often overspend on their infrastructure resources or choose resources that inadequately support their needs.

For example, without proper insight into infrastructure resource usage, , IT operations staff, Cloud operations staff and other IT resource buyers may ensure they have what they need to support a new mission-critical app by buying twice as much as they think they need, just to be safe. This type of waste and inefficiency, is due to the lack of real information and leaves the business at risk for unanticipated shortfalls and performance problems.

Lacking a comprehensive and accurate understanding of ongoing resource usage, changing workloads, trends, and potential bottlenecks, IT must base project requirements on best guesses. When these estimates are too aggressive, under-provisioning leaves the business vulnerable to service degradation or disruption—hurting business productivity and performance, and frustrating customers and end users. When estimates are too conservative, overprovisioning wastes valuable budget and resources, increases administrative overhead, and diverts funds from more beneficial areas.

With the lack of visibility and stability, along with ever-increasing unknown security and compliance risks, ultimately the quality and consistency of end-user experiences suffer. To avoid unexpected downtime for your users and to take full control of your IT infrastructure costs in an ever-changing IT and business environment, you’ll want capacity management that is both automated and effective.

Features of Effective Capacity Management Solutions

Effective capacity management should help IT meet the dynamic requirements of the business while controlling and reducing costs. To do this, your capacity management solution should cover three critical needs:

1. Automatically ensure the right resources are allocated to each application at the right time, so those applications are deployed precisely when they’re needed
2. Adjust IT resources proactively to address growth, periodic, and cyclic changes in demand, so business and digital services are consistently delivered at a speed that meets customer expectations
3. Optimize on premises and cloud infrastructure investments while reducing software and service costs