With the rapid change in the technology environment, to meet the flexible business requirements, organizations have started looking at cloud services to adopt the most resilient platform which can cope with such changes. Moving the workloads into cloud environment provides higher flexibility, deeper visibility into monitoring, and better management. However moving into Cloud services sometimes exhaust the IT budget. It has been observed that most of the organizations, not having strategy around cost savings, end up paying higher cost to the cloud providers. Cost saving in cloud isn't a simple goal to achieve, however with proper planning and using below mentions five strategies can help any organization to reduce the overall cost on cloud spending up to 20-25 percent.

Know what you need
Due to inefficient practice around capacity planning, lack of expertise, and to avoid any performance or downtime related issues, organizations usually subscribe the cloud workload, services or microservices approx. 30-40 percent higher in capacity more than what is actually required to meet business requirements. In most of the cases compute, storage and other microservices remains unused while organizations are continuously paying to cloud providers. It is important to know what is the minimum resources requirement specific to your business environment, for any service to be hosted on cloud.

A good capacity planning practice, due diligence on business functional requirement, Classification, ROI calculation, associated microservices analysis, resource requirement base lining etc. can help organizations to reduce approx. 20 percent cloud costing.

Establish Oversight
Efficiency is the vital factor to reduce the cost in the cloud environment. To improve the efficiency, it must be man-aged, and no environment can be managed until a robust oversight mechanism is in place from monitoring, management and analysis perspective. In cloud environment sometimes resources are over utilized due to malfunction, anomaly, malware or other reasons, which may add up a decent cost in your overall cloud spending. For whatever services or microservices are being subscribed on cloud, organizations should implement integrated or third party monitoring and analysis platforms to ensure resources are being utilized the way those were supposed to.

Resources monitoring, Microservices usage reports, alerts and notifications, data and trend analysis can help in reducing the cost by improving the efficiency.

Use automation tools
 Apart from the resources utilization cost in cloud environment, there is always significate cost involved when it comes to the associated management services such as migration, administration or maintenance support services. For cloud providers such as Azure or AWS, it requires specialized skills and high end skills or sometimes whole team of specialists, to manage the workload and associated services. There is various automation tools available in the industry which can perform the mundane maintenance related tasks automatically, can perform migration activities, increase the performance and reduce resource utilization to lower your utilization bills.

Managed services cost analysis of various platforms and use of automation tools can help in reducing at least 25-30 percent management cost.

Get Down To Your Cost Breakup
When any workload or service moves into cloud it requires associated microservices such as security, network, connectivity, load balancing, integration etc. while these services can be chosen based on business requirement, it is important to have the detailed utilization and incurred cost breakup from cloud service provided to ensure the all services are being utilized as expected and to do the ROI analysis on each microservice. At many cases customers subscribes the microservices at initial phase of the projects and remains unused for a longer period.

There are multiple third party microservices are available from other service providers which can be integrated with your cloud services and can provide significant cost savings.

Explore Multi Service Platforms
It is obvious that organizations look for a cloud service plat-form which is reliable, provides higher uptime, higher security, higher performance and meets the maximum requirement around associated microservices, hence organizations are ready to pay the premium amount or higher cost to such cloud providers.

It is advisable to do the segregation of multiple business requirement on various parameters such security, availability, performance, criticality and microservices requirements. Further organizations can choose to engage 2-3 different cloud providers to cater the different business.