How to Optimize your Cloud and Licensing Agreement Costs

Need to lower your cloud costs? Want to optimize your licensing agreement costs, but not sure how? You can save thousands of dollars through Cloudnexa’s trusted guidance.

AWS Spend Optimization

There are a lot of wasted costs in most IT environments. These include end of life, overprovisioning, underutilizing, orphaned resources, upgrade options, time, and commitment. When you meet with Cloudnexa, we will help you identify immediate cost savings as well as longer-term cost savings in these categories.

Lowering Cloud Spend

Clients typically save 20%-60% through Cloudnexa’s strategic guidance.

To lower cloud spend, the first step is to evaluate your current IT environment. The following are key categories that we will review with you to identify potential cost savings:

• End of life (EOL): There are two categories to assess end of life—Service and Software. For Service EOL, it’s important to evaluate sunsetting sizing as AWS offerings are continually updating. Some instances are EOL and are more expensive to run. It’s important to reassess to lower costs. For Software EOL, products may be under an old licensing agreement that is no longer valid and making changes can save you money.
• Overprovisioning: When companies have an issue in their infrastructure, they often use hardware or services to solve the issue rather than identifying the root cause and solving the problem. This leads to an overprovisioned environment. We will help you identify if this is the case with your environment.
• Underutilizing: Things change over time. Companies may have provisioned a certain number of instances, but might not be using all of them currently. Whatever you provision, you pay for. Cloudnexa will help you look for underutilized provisioning.
• Orphaned resources: When companies are busy, it’s easy to forget about resources. For example, you may have spun up some instances for testing. While you no longer need them for operations, they may still be running. We will help identify these orphaned resources.
• Upgrade Options: Who doesn’t love upgrades? Leveraging the newest AWS offering within a service may increase performance and lower costs. Cloudnexa will provide trusted guidance for these key decisions.
• Time: Time is one of the most precious commodities in the IT world. Doing these checks yourself usually takes longer and can lead to wasted savings. Leveraging Cloudnexa’s expertise will ensure that you start saving faster.
• Commitment: Making AWS commitments can save you money. But how to commit and the commitment amount is much more complex. Cloudnexa can review AWS savings plans and reserved instances, making sure you commit to the correct commitment levels to save money. We typically see clients save 20-50% instantly by committing to appropriate levels.

Optimizing Licensing Costs

Is your licensing agreement up for renewal? Go through a Cloudnexa review before you make any decisions. Optimized License Assessments (OLAs) save customers on average 38% of their licensing costs by right sizing their existing licenses. Running unsupported technology causes compliance issues, and custom support agreements are a costly way for customers to remain in compliance.

Cloudnexa can help you optimize your licensing costs by completing a review to ensure you purchase the proper number of cores. We can help you optimize the licenses that you’re using. Our neutral, third-party reviews include:

• Microsoft enterprise and licensing agreements to understand license rule changes and impacts.
• Leverage industry-leading tools to collect data and assess measurements.
• Analysis of existing on-prem and AWS licensing positions and impacts.

Our OLA process is as follows:

• Collect: Determine prospective customer workloads to optimize and collect utilization data for the underlying workloads.
• Analyze: Analyze the data to model cost and licensing optimization scenarios.
• Plan: Review the results and build a business case or start a migration proof of concept.

Well Architected Review

An AWS Well-Architected Review helps cloud architects build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for their applications and workloads. Based on five pillars—operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization—an AWS Well-Architected Review provides a consistent approach for customers and partners to evaluate architectures and implement designs that can scale over time.

Framework Overview

The AWS Well-Architected Framework describes the key concepts, design principles, and architectural best practices for designing and running workloads in the cloud. By answering a set of foundational questions, you learn how well your architecture aligns with cloud best practices and are provided guidance for making improvements.

Cost Optimization Pillar

The cost optimization pillar focuses on avoiding unnecessary costs. Key topics include understanding and controlling where money is being spent, selecting the most appropriate and right number of resource types, analyzing spend over time, and scaling to meet business needs without overspending.

How to Start Saving Money

Customers who have engaged Cloudnexa have realized significant cost savings, improved their application performance, and eliminated risks.

Cloudnexa is an AWS Well-Architected Program partner and has in-depth training on the Well-Architected Framework. We can help you implement best practices, measure the state of your workloads, and make improvements where assistance is required. Customers who have engaged Cloudnexa have realized significant cost savings, improved the performance of their applications, and eliminated security risks and other high-risk issues.

We want our customers to have the best possible experience with cloud solutions. Follow our review process to make an informed decision:

Learn more at https://www.cloudnexa.com/aws-well-architected-reviews/ or schedule your review by contacting us.