Several businesses lack the time, expertise, and resources to effectively optimize their cloud infrastructure. Azure managed services come to rescue your business with end-to-end cloud optimization and enhancement. Often, optimization efforts are irregular and reactive, addressing issues only as they arise. This firefighting approach consumes valuable time that could be better spent delivering services. In the worst-case scenario, businesses neglect optimization entirely, leading to increased costs due to deficient performance and availability.

Managing cloud infrastructure is not central to your business, so it's understandable that your priorities lie elsewhere. This article focuses on how Azure managed services enhances and optimizes your cloud journey hassle-free.

Let’s explore!!

What makes Azure Cloud Optimization more different?

Microsoft Azure cloud services can utilize cloud resources optimally and cost-effectively, while minimizing resource waste, energy consumption, and carbon emissions. As a business, it involves managing your cloud infrastructure's cost, minimizing carbon emissions, and optimizing energy usage to create a cost-effective, modern, efficient, and sustainable application.

Cloud computing costs can escalate rapidly, particularly for businesses managing large volumes of data, experiencing high traffic, or relying on mission-critical applications. Azure managed service providers can make your workloads more efficient through cloud cost optimization, which is more efficient, and optimizing for your cloud infrastructure.

Here are some benefits of Azure cloud optimization:

• Understanding, measuring, optimizing, and tracking your cloud costs should be a top priority. Full control over your monthly bill can help you allocate resources efficiently and avoid unexpected expenses. Cloud providers offer various tools and services to help you manage costs, such as cost analysis dashboards and budget alerts.
• Reducing carbon emissions is another important consideration. Cloud computing consumes a significant amount of energy, contributing to carbon emissions. By optimizing your cloud resources and adopting energy-efficient practices, you can help reduce your carbon footprint. This not only benefits the environment but also demonstrates your commitment to sustainability.
• Improving application performance is crucial for providing a positive user experience. Slow or irresponsive applications can lead to frustrated customers and lost revenue. By optimizing your cloud resources, you can ensure that your applications run smoothly and efficiently. This can lead to higher customer satisfaction and increased revenue.
• Saving on your application's costs can free up budget for additional features, refactoring, and innovation. By optimizing your cloud resources and reducing unnecessary spending, you can reinvest those savings into improving your application and driving business growth.

4 Essential Strategies of Azure Managed Services to Optimize Cloud Costs

• Right Sizing Resources: Optimizing your cloud resources to the right size is crucial for managing and controlling costs effectively. It's not just about saving money but also about finding the right balance between performance and expenditure, particularly in meeting your internal customer service-level agreements efficiently. Striking this balance is key to satisfying both your application managers and your financial and cloud operations teams.

Azure managed service providers play a huge role in balancing the resources that your business requires and optimizing according to your needs. Right-sizing involves adjusting your cloud resources to ensure that you're not over-provisioning or under-provisioning. Over-provisioning can lead to unnecessary costs, while under-provisioning can result in inferior performance and user dissatisfaction.

• Clean-Up: Another crucial aspect of cost savings in cloud computing is managing cleanup operations. When dealing with numerous workloads or complex projects, many resources are created as transitional steps and often forgotten, leading to unnecessary costs. This is especially true during lift and shift migrations, where customers initially replicate resources from a fixed, non-flexible environment, resulting in overallocated services.

Cleaning up unused items should be a primary approach for short-term, quick cost-saving wins. Integrating this into a recurring process will help identify unassigned or underutilized infrastructure, along with any operational shortcomings, and reveal process gaps that may have broader impacts than just costs. Azure managed service providers make it essential to periodically assess the evolution of your infrastructure to identify any resources that may have been left unassigned and incorporate this into your technical debt management operations.

• Azure Reservations & Cost-Saving Plans: There are agreements involved with one-three years for certain plans. These agreements require a commitment to specific Microsoft Azure services or a certain level of cloud compute usage for either one or three years. In return, businesses receive substantial cost savings on their cloud computing expenses. While these agreements can result in significant savings, they have minimal impact on the carbon footprint. Microsoft Azure recommends implementing reservations and savings plans once you have optimized your resource allocation and conducted regular cleanups. It is important to monitor and adjust your usage periodically to ensure it aligns with up to 100 percent of your requirements. Azure managed service providers constantly monitor the performance and usage to make sure your business meets the requirements.

• Tuning Database & Applications: Many customers choose to migrate applications that rely on legacy databases to the cloud. However, even cloud-native applications can sometimes be developed using outdated data handling patterns due to a company's historical data requirements. This can lead to inefficiencies in the cloud environment, such as slow queries and resource-intensive operations, resulting in higher costs.

Optimizing the database is crucial for improving application performance and reducing costs. Azure services streamline data exchanges and minimize resource usage, businesses that can downsize their infrastructure and save on data and networking expenses. But that alone isn’t enough.

Applications that have been migrated using common cloud migration patterns like lift and shift, refactor, rearchitect, and rebuild may not fully leverage the scalability and flexibility of cloud services. To maximize cloud efficiency, applications should be designed specifically for the cloud, taking advantage of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) offering.

Conclusion

Investing some of the savings into Azure managed service providers from optimizing cloud costs into improving application performance can lead to significant benefits. This approach not only enhances application performance but also contributes to overall cloud resource optimization, resulting in higher performance and lower costs in the long run. Think wise and optimize!

Happy Learning!!