4 Azure considerations to reduce your costs

Cloud computing offers the fastest route to innovation and comprehensive security for any organisation needing to keep pace with an ever-increasing competitive landscape and rapidly evolving security threats.

As with any cloud provider, determining a cost-effective infrastructure is crucial to a successful Azure deployment. Ease of scalability gives way to rapidly increasing costs, both direct and indirect, if not carefully managed. Having the ability to control and predict cloud cost is key to any IT organisation’s cloud success. When done correctly, cloud adoption should lead to significant cost savings and increased agility.

In this guide, we discuss four steps to controlling cost with Azure, while getting the best of all the available offerings and features. For organisations newly adopting cloud and those that have had a cloud-first approach for some time, proper planning, deployment, monitoring and optimisation will ensure success in utilising Azure.

1. In-depth planning

Whether your organisation is planning to fully migrate to the cloud, utilise a hybrid cloud model or just introduce limited workloads, proper planning is critical to ensuring a successful deployment from an on-premises environment to the Azure Cloud.

Focusing on long-term support and growth must be fully considered while planning. Not only will an eye to the future help decrease technical support needs, but this focus will allow adequate planning for future cost increases. The flexibility inherent in the cloud is also one of the most difficult hurdles in planning a cloud adoption.

2. Implementation & deployment

With a proper plan in place, the next step is the deployment of the necessary resources. Whether your organisation is focused on fully moving to the cloud or simply starting small, there are considerations for pricing and flexibility that will make a big difference further down the road. There are several different options available for compute, disk and databases that can drastically reduce costs.

3. Monitoring the environment, costs & trends

Ultimately, the only way to truly understand where and how you are using resources and their associated costs is to use a dashboard to visualise where the most money is being spent. Azure Cost Management provides a comprehensive look at your organisation and its resource usage patterns. This includes costs both by Azure services and also by third-party Marketplace products.

4. Optimising the environment & cost

With the fluid nature of many cloud environments, it’s important to continuously evaluate the needs, performance and utilisation of your environment. Once opportunities for scaling have been identified, you can take further action. Depending on the types of resources in use, different classes of resources or shifts to Platform as a Service (PaaS) may be warranted.

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