Trying to reduce Azure costs? Here are four ways to maximize the ROI of your Azure environment:
Scale Down
Determine if resources can be deallocated during off-hours and look for opportunities to scale down. If your business operates during daytime hours and users are not or only lightly accessing systems during off-hours, there may be opportunities to do scheduled shut-downs and/or scheduled scale-downs to take advantage of the utility pricing model of Azure.
Does your business have a seasonal flux? If so, there are typically opportunities to scale resources down during slower times. For example, a retail company may scale up during the holiday season or during sales promotions, and then scale down during slower periods.
Delete Unused Resources
Regularly review the environment for unused or orphaned resources. When building Azure environments (especially Dev/Test environments that can change often), resources that were used for testing can often be left online inadvertently. When deleting VMs, storage or public IPs can be orphaned. Going through an Azure environment regularly and deleting unused resources is good practice to ensure you are not paying for unnecessary resources.
Elastic SQL Pools
Consolidate Azure SQL databases by utilizing Azure Elastic SQL pools. They are a great way to consolidate individual Azure SQL databases to share compute and potentially save a considerable amount of money. Elastic pools also serve as a simple resource allocation mechanism and ensure Azure SQL databases get performance resources whenever they need it.
Partner with an MSP
Having a managed Azure environment ensures that your business is only paying for what it needs. A cloud managed services provider (MSP) reduces operational and management costs to save your business money in the long run. When a cloud MSP is managing your Azure environment, you can rest assured that your systems and resources are scaled efficiently.
For more ways to optimize your Azure spend and security, read Atmosera’s white paper: Continuing Your Azure Journey: Security and ROI Optimizations.