Tag Archives: cloud computing

4 Important Considerations To Avoid Wasted Cloud Spend

Post Syndicated from Andy Haine original https://www.anchor.com.au/blog/2020/11/4-important-considerations-to-avoid-wasted-cloud-spend/

Growth for cloud services is at an all-time high in 2020, partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic and businesses scrambling to migrate to the cloud as soon as possible. But with that record growth, wasted spend on unnecessary or unoptimised cloud usage is also at an all-time high.

 

Wasted cloud spend generally boils down to paying for services or resources that you aren’t using. You can most commonly attribute wasted spend on services that aren’t being used at all in either the development or production stages, services that are often idle (not being used 80-90% of the time), or simply over-provisioned resources (more resources than necessary).

 

Wasted cloud spend is expected to reach as high as $17.6 billion in 2020. In a 2019 report from Flexera, they measured the actual waste of cloud spending at 35 percent of all cloud services revenue. This highlights how crucial it can be, and how much money a business can save, by having an experienced and dedicated AWS management team looking after their cloud services. In many cases, having the right team managing your cloud services can more than repay any associated management costs. Read on below for some further insight into the most common pitfalls of wasted cloud spending.

Lack Of Research, Skills and/or Management

A lack of proper research, skills or management involved in a migration to cloud services is probably the most frequent and costly pitfall. Without proper AWS cloud migration best practices and a comprehensive strategy in place, businesses may dive into setting up their services without realising how complex the initial learning curve can be to sufficiently manage their cloud spend. It’s a common occurrence for not just businesses, but anyone first experimenting with cloud, to see a bill that’s much higher than they first anticipated. This can lead a business to believe the cloud is significantly more expensive than it really needs to be.

 

It’s absolutely crucial to have a strategy in place for all potential usage situations, so that you don’t end up paying much more than you should. This is something that a managed cloud provider can expertly design for you, to ensure that you’re only paying for exactly what you need and potentially quite drastically reducing your spend over time.

Unused Or Unnecessary Snapshots

Snapshots can create a point in time backup of your AWS services. Each snapshot contains all of the information that is needed to restore your data to the point when the snapshot was taken. This is an incredibly important and useful tool when managed correctly. However it’s also one of the biggest mistakes businesses can make in their AWS cloud spend.

 

Charges for snapshots are based on the amount of data stored, and each snapshot increases the amount of data that you’re storing. Many users will take and store a high number of snapshots and never delete them when they’re no longer needed, and in a lot of cases, not realise that this is exponentially increasing their cloud spend.

Idle Resources

Idle resources account for another of the largest parts of cloud waste. Idle resources are resources that aren’t being used for anything, yet you’re still paying for them. They can be useful in the event of resource spike, but for the most part may not be worth you paying for them when you look at your average usage over a period of time. A good analogy for this would be paying rent for a holiday home all year round, when you only spend 2 weeks using it every Christmas. This is where horizontal scaling comes into play. When set up by skilled AWS experts, horizontal scaling can turn services and resources on or off depending on when they are actually needed.

Over-Provisioned Services

This particular issue somewhat ties into idle resources, as seen above. Over-provisioned services refers to paying for entire instances that are not in use whatsoever, or very minimally. This could be an Amazon RDS service for a database that’s not in use, an Amazon EC2 instance that’s idle 100% of the time, or any number of other services. It’s important to have a cloud strategy in place that involves frequently auditing what services your business is using and not using, in order to minimise your cloud spend as much as possible.

Conclusion

As you can see from the statistics provided by Flexera above, wasted cloud spend is one of the most significant problems facing businesses that have migrated to the cloud. But with the right team of experts in place, wasted spend can easily be avoided, and even mitigate management costs, leaving you in a far better position in terms of both service performance, reliability and support, and overall costs.

The post 4 Important Considerations To Avoid Wasted Cloud Spend appeared first on AWS Managed Services by Anchor.

Why is it vital for businesses to outsource AWS management?

Post Syndicated from Andy Haine original https://www.anchor.com.au/blog/2020/10/why-is-it-vital-for-businesses-to-outsource-aws-management/

Some of us may have learnt during 2020 that there are simply some things that one cannot DIY without proper skills and expertise. Perhaps during the pandemic lockdown, your local hairdresser was closed, and you turned to a DIY YouTube tutorial and learnt this the hardest way of all. But, even if you survived 2020 without a fringe 2 inches too short, managing AWS services is a whole other ball game that requires years of training and dedicated skill to properly deploy, manage and keep expenses under control.

As powerful as AWS is, and as much as it can do for your business, it can be all-but impossible to do it right if you have never set foot in the AWS Management console before. AWS is complex, and requires expertise to truly get the most from it. While you may be able to perform basic provisioning tasks and perhaps get a service up and running, ensuring that that service is performing optimally and cost-efficiently is where professional AWS management can truly revolutionise your infrastructure strategy and budget.

Managed AWS services is one of the largest outsourced areas of the IT industry. According to a recent Gartner forecast, almost 19% of cloud budgets are spent on cloud management-related services, such as cloud consulting, implementation, migration and managed services – with this percentage expected to increase in the next few years (and for good reason). In this article we will delve into just a few of the reasons why you’re far better off putting your AWS management in the hands of experts.

Cost Savings

Wasted cloud spend is a very common occurrence within the cloud services industry, with many cloud users not optimising costs where they can. In a 2019 report from Flexera, they measured the actual waste of cloud spending at 35 percent.

One of the most beneficial things an AWS management service provider can offer your business is ensuring that you’re only paying for what your business needs. It may save your business significantly more money in the long run, even when factoring in management fees.

Free Up Your Time

You should focus on what you and your business do best. Sure, you could put in many hours to understand as much as possible and get up and running yourself, but many businesses find that time is much better spent on focussing on your core service offerings and leaving management to your managed service provider.

On top of the initial learning curve, there is also the time investment needed for ongoing training as new AWS cloud services are released and new management tools are developed. Best practice changes very frequently, and it can be a significant undertaking to try and keep your finger on the pulse while simultaneously trying to handle every other area of your business.

Proactive Management

Ensuring that your business leverages AWS’ ability to scale and adjust depending on your current needs is essential. An AWS partner and managed service provider can help you understand your businesses needs, and adjust course as necessary to meet each new scenario.

A good example of scaling to meet current needs is the COVID-19 pandemic. The cloud services industry has seen significant growth during 2020 due to its ability to rapidly scale and support sudden growth. For example, web traffic and bandwidth requirements skyrocketed in 2020 with more people turning to eCommerce to acquire their everyday household items as well as remotely attend school and work.

Avoiding Downtime and Increasing Stability

Any number of things can happen to your hosted services, and when they do, it’s crucial that you have an experienced team on hand to tackle whatever comes your way. There’s nothing worse than hosting your mission-critical services on AWS and not having the experience to get services up and running as soon as possible when things go wrong.

A qualified AWS management team will also put best practice measures into place to improve the resilience of your configuration, and minimise the chance of anything going wrong in the first place.

Conclusion

When deciding what is the best course of action for your business, it’s imperative to ensure that your mission-critical cloud services are in good hands. It can be shown that in many cases, having AWS experts handle your businesses cloud needs can more than repay the associated management fees, leaving you better off both in terms of support and costs.

If you’re looking for advice on AWS cloud migration best practices, don’t hesitate to get in touch with one of our expert cloud architects today.

The post Why is it vital for businesses to outsource AWS management? appeared first on AWS Managed Services by Anchor.

Cloud Services VS COVID-19: How has the pandemic affected the Cloud Hosting industry?

Post Syndicated from Andy Haine original https://www.anchor.com.au/blog/2020/10/cloud-services-vs-covid-19-how-has-the-pandemic-affected-the-cloud-hosting-industry/

2020 has surely been a questionable year for the human race. An unexpected hail storm, if you will. But for the cloud services market? According to recent statistics, not a cloud in the sky.

Despite the unprecedented chaos that has befallen many facets of our daily lives during the COVID-19 pandemic, the world’s cloud spending has continued to significantly and consistently increase year-on-year. When it comes to the growth of cloud services, 2020 is no exception.

Ultimately, this makes sense. Demand and reliance on digital services has greatly increased this year as many businesses hurry to transform their bricks and mortar presences into digital income streams, in an attempt to survive such uncertain times. Grocery and home goods purchases, learning, working and even many social activities are now conducted primarily online as we fight the global challenges of COVID-19.

According to recent research published by Synergy Research Group, cloud spending passed $30 billion in the second quarter of 2020, an increase of $7.5 billion when compared to the same time last year. In terms of region-specific growth, cloud services have continued to grow steadily all around the world, seemingly regardless of how each region has uniquely been affected by the pandemic.

Of the largest Cloud service providers, AWS has continued to maintain a dominant lead in market share, steadily towering over Google and Microsoft’s cloud service offerings. At the time of writing, the market share is dispersed approximately as follows:

Amazon AWS: 33%

Microsoft Azure: 18%

Google Cloud Platform: 9%

Some of the smaller providers that trail this list include Alibaba Cloud, IBM, Salesforce, Tencent and Oracle.

Cloud infrastructure market share figures, including IaaS, PaaS, and Hosted Private Cloud: Q2 2020

For those of you who may have a penchant for the numbers, we’ve delved a little further into the figures for Logging as a service (LaaS), Platform as a service (PaaS) and hosted private cloud in 2020.

Public IaaS and PaaS services have maintained the majority of the market share, which grew by 34% in Q2. The lead that Amazon, Google, Microsoft Azure, Alibaba, and IBM hold over their competitors is even more significant in public cloud, where they control close to 80% of the market combined.

Regarding their findings, chief analyst at Synergy Research, John Dinsdale, had this to say:

“As far as cloud market numbers go, it’s almost as if there were no COVID-19 pandemic raging around the world. As enterprises struggle to adapt to new norms, the advantages of public cloud are amplified.” 

“The percentage growth rate is coming down, as it must when a market reaches enormous scale, but the incremental growth in absolute dollar terms remains truly impressive. The market remains on track to grow by well over 30% in 2020.”

As their findings indicate, the global pandemic certainly hasn’t slowed down the growth rate of Cloud services. With the pressure of more and more companies being forced online, or to shift their entire organisation to being able to work from home, the need to migrate to the cloud is clearly far greater than ever before.

John Dinsdale also had this to say:

“If anything, the pandemic has helped to highlight some of the main benefits of public cloud,” 

Chief among those benefits is the flexibility and scalability that cloud hosting offers. In a time where millions of workers have had to change the way they conduct their daily lives, and companies have had to quickly shift resources, the ability to be able to scale horizontally or vertically to accommodate for that shift in lifestyle is more important than ever. Where other industries have been devastated by COVID-19, the cloud services industry has proven to be more durable, largely due to its capacity to assist companies in tackling the numerous challenges that a pandemic inflicts.

Ready to tap in?

If you have been considering a switch to the cloud, or believe that your business could benefit from additional scalability, flexibility and durability during the new era of heightened online commerce, we strongly suggest consulting with a certified AWS partner, to make your move as smooth, secure and cost-efficient as possible.

Cloud services have proven to be one of the most resilient (and thriving) industries in a COVID-19 world. This can also be said of most companies who have utilised it to bring their businesses up-to-speed and online. If you’d like to tap into this success for your business alike, get in touch with one of our AWS-qualified experts today to learn how we can assist you.

The post Cloud Services VS COVID-19: How has the pandemic affected the Cloud Hosting industry? appeared first on AWS Managed Services by Anchor.

Anchor Joins AWS Service Delivery Program: Amazon EC2 for Windows Server

Post Syndicated from Andy Haine original https://www.anchor.com.au/blog/2020/10/anchor-joins-aws-service-delivery-program-amazon-ec2-for-windows-server/

We are excited to announce that Anchor has joined the Amazon EC2 for Windows Service Delivery Program (SPD). This new SDP classification complements an expanding portfolio of AWS certifications, substantiating our commitment to both our AWS partnership and enabling the cloud for Australian businesses.

The AWS Service Delivery Program acknowledges select partners within the AWS Partner Network (APN) who have demonstrated technical proficiency across specialised solution areas. Achieving SDP status involves a stringent validation process to certify a deep understanding of, and adherence to, AWS architectural best practices. 

Amazon EC2 for Windows Server Partners are certified for delivering Windows Server environments on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). They are recommended by AWS for managing secure, reliable, and high-performance environments for deploying Windows-based applications and workloads. 

As part of the validation process for this competency, Anchor was required to demonstrate proven customer success through real customer engagement to validate that we had the technical proficiency and resources to help customers migrate, manage, or deploy Microsoft Workloads to AWS.

This AWS SDP reinforces Anchors expertise in helping businesses both modernise and future-proof legacy windows applications by replatforming onto AWS Cloud. 

“Our new SDP status for Amazon EC2 for Windows provides our customers with the highest level of confidence in our technical aptitude and alignment to AWS best practices.” – Josh Chiswell, Director of Architecture and Professional Services, APAC, Anchor Systems.

The proficiency also provides exclusive access to service-specific funding programs which partners can pass on to customers. If your business is looking to modernise or replatform old windows workloads, contact our cloud consultants for a complimentary cloud assessment.

 

Why Anchor? We exist to help SMBs and emerging enterprises who need managed AWS and cloud engineering services. Anchor enables the cloud by deeply engaging with your business. We architect, deploy, run and optimise cloud workloads and advocate for cloud best practices. Anchor’s team of certified engineers can support your workloads in three different time zones with 24x7x365 coverage from Sydney.

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Is your cloud hosting backup plan ready for 2021?

Post Syndicated from Ross Krumbeck original https://www.anchor.com.au/blog/2020/10/is-your-cloud-hosting-backup-plan-ready-for-2021/

Most businesses have a whole array of backup plans in place. A backup plan for when staff members call in sick, a backup plan for recouping damaged or lost stock, a backup plan for emergency expenses… but what about a backup plan for their cloud hosting services?

 

All too often, backing up one’s website or application, particularly when housed on cloud hosting, is a task left a little more neglected than it should be. This can be due to it being put in the “too hard” basket, or the “something to eventually get around to” basket, or simply from being overlooked due to a business believing that they have a plan in place, but never actually testing that it works. Staff turnover can also play a part. If the staff member or team, who initially set up your backup plan has since moved on, it can be a chaotic experience to unravel the plan when disaster suddenly strikes.

 

In particular, if a business conducts significant online trade, unexpected downtime of their websites or applications can mean heavy losses. In 2015, one of Anchor’s larger e-commerce customers transacted more than $100 million dollars in revenue through their Magento store. Crunching those numbers means a single hour of downtime equals a potential revenue loss of around $11,415. It should really go without saying, if a website or application is a critical part of a businesses income stream, they should be taking every precaution to guard against outages in the same way they protect themselves against any other challenges.

 

We must always keep in mind that no technology is completely fail-proof. Even cloud services are not exempt from experiencing occasional outages and unavoidable technical challenges, especially if not regularly maintained and managed by AWS-qualified professionals.

 

As we continue to wade our way through 2020, reliance on the digital world has become far heavier and more demanding than ever before. According to research published by Synergy Research Group, spending on cloud services has continued to rise during the pandemic, passing $30 billion in the second quarter of 2020 – a massive increase of $7.5 billion when compared to the second quarter of 2019. As more and more businesses turn to cloud services to continue their survival, the greater the need for a focus on preparing for downtime.

 

As we swiftly approach the Christmas shopping period, loss of profits in the event of an outage could be far worse should they strike during the busiest time for online sales. Realistically, the real cost could be four or five times your ‘business as usual’ number. If you add to that the reputational damage to your brand, the financial impacts keep growing.

 

Fortunately, every cloud provider offers some form of Service Level Agreement (SLA), including an uptime guarantee, and AWS is no different. SLAs and guarantees set out to give us confidence in the resilience of the network, infrastructure and services while describing how we may be compensated should an unscheduled outage occur. But even a 99.5% uptime guarantee means your website or app can be offline for nearly 22 minutes each and every month without compensation – and that can add up to a lot of lost sales for a busy online business.

 

With that being the case, the best thing you can do is ensure you are well prepared to get back online as quickly as possible. As well as ensuring that you have a disaster recovery plan in place, it’s just as important to regularly test it too. Relying on a cloud provider’s uptime guarantee is never an alternative to taking the necessary steps to ensure your deployment is highly available. It’s worth investing a little more to protect your bottom line.

 

To add a further complication, there are several conditions that may prevent you from claiming any SLA compensation. If you aren’t aware of these conditions, it’s entirely possible (even likely in many cases!) that you may have already voided any SLA protections.

 

If you’d like to know more about ensuring your business is eligible for SLA protections, you can download our free eBook here.

 

If your business doesn’t have a professional backup plan in place for your cloud hosting services, or you haven’t thoroughly tested that your existing plan works lately, our cloud experts can assist you in ensuring that your business backup plan is ready for the busy Christmas period, as well as future-proofed for 2021 – because after the way things have gone in 2020, who knows what’s in store for us next!

 

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