As we enter the new year, I’d like to challenge every company with an Azure environment to “do more with less” by raising the operational maturity of their cloud environment. Successful companies look at the cloud as a financial advantage to their businesses because of the opportunity to apply optimizations across each spending area. The unsuccessful companies deploy services and are ineffective at applying spend to improvement, likely leaving it as they initially provisioned it.
Part 1 of this series outlines the first five ways to optimize your Azure environment.
In the diagram below, see an example of a cloud maturity curve, demonstrating the stages of becoming a cloud-capable organization. The key operational hurdle occurs at the “Platform” level where a company implements a Cloud Center of Excellence and can achieve key gains:
For the remainder of this blog, we’ll focus on the 10 optimizations that a company could seek to implement and improve. A company would generally see a 20% - 35% cost reduction and more operational optimization if these are implemented.
Let’s hit each one at a time:
Number 1: Building a Methodology for Cost Reviews and Organizational Discipline
A company needs to be able to analyze its costs based on owner, business unit, application, technology, dev/prod/QA/test, and other qualities. This can be done in Power BI, or natively in Azure Cost Management … IF… you have tagged your resources properly.
See the following view from Azure Cost Management where you can see many of the services, resource groups, business units, types, etc.
A few good ways to implement improvements to Azure through cost optimization include: