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Strategically Managing Technology Expenses in the Pursuit of Innovation and Competitiveness

In today's fast-paced business environment, handling technology expenses has become increasingly important for companies to remain competitive and innovative. Companies need to prioritize and strategize their technology expenses to ensure that they are investing in the right technology that can help them achieve their business objectives and stay ahead of their competition.

Strategically Managing Technology Expenses in the Pursuit of Innovation and Competitiveness

Strategic management of technology expenses involves carefully analyzing and assessing the expenses related to technology investments. It requires identifying the technology needs of the business, evaluating the available options, and determining the best fit for the company's budget and goals. It also involves monitoring the expenses to ensure that they are in line with the budget and that the technology investments are delivering the expected results.


By strategically managing technology expenses, companies can gain a competitive edge and achieve their business objectives. It can help them improve their operational efficiency, enhance the quality of their products or services, and provide a better customer experience. Furthermore, it can facilitate innovation, which is essential for companies to stay relevant in the constantly evolving business landscape.


Strategic management of technology expenses is crucial for companies to stay competitive and innovative. It involves identifying the technology needs of the business, evaluating the available options, monitoring the expenses, and ensuring that the technology investments are aligned with the company's goals and budget.


Pillars of Cloud Cost Optimization Strategies


Cybersecurity professionals can conduct a thorough assessment of your cloud infrastructure to identify inefficiencies and implement necessary improvements to reduce costs and maintain a secure environment. Their comprehensive approach enables faster and more detailed cost reduction than relying on in-house teams or cost management tools alone. By utilizing five cost-optimization strategies, they can help you define key goals and determine the best methods to achieve them, resulting in increased transparency and improved financial optimization of your cloud resources.


To identify cost-saving opportunities, we evaluate the current cloud portfolio and suggest tactical steps to reduce costs.


Right-sizing instances for lower costs:

We offer a service that assesses the virtual machines in your cloud estate to ensure that they are correctly resourced for their workload. This typically reduces the total cost of ownership by up to 7 percent.


Our service includes consistently provisioning the right size instance for CPU memory, IOPS, network, and HDD. We also enhance capacity, choose the right instance class, actively manage expiry dates, and fine-tune configurations to help you optimize your resources.


Reducing environments and using auto-scaling:

One way to reduce costs and improve efficiency is by consolidating opportunities to scale automatically. This can lead to up to 9% reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO).


Here are some steps you can take to achieve this: implement an auto-off strategy per workload, identify switch-off opportunities, eliminate redundant or semi-redundant environments, utilize infrastructure as code capabilities to tear down and rebuild servers during off-periods, rationalize public IP addresses, optimize auto-scaling and predictively identify wasteful provisioning.


By following these steps, you can rationalize and scale your environment, which can lead to significant cost savings and improved performance.


Managing pricing models:

Managing pricing models for cloud services can be complicated and constantly changing. However, by implementing smarter management techniques, we can typically reduce costs by up to 10 percent.


These techniques include optimizing volume and reservation commitments, using spot instances for non-time-critical workloads, consolidating billing, moving workloads to the lowest-cost geo-tenants, utilizing trusted advisor data, choosing between full service and self-managed capabilities, optimizing licenses, arbitraging different Operating Systems, Databases, and Platform-as-a-Service offerings, selecting between build-and-host, buy-and-host, or Software-as-a-Service options, and optimizing tax positions.


For cost-saving opportunities, we analyze current application architecture and governance policies to modernize and automate governance.


Creating a cost-effective architecture:

Creating a cost-effective architecture involves adopting the right PaaS, storage, and DevOps strategies to promote a consolidated and appropriately sized storage and server infrastructure.


By combining a DevOps/CICD delivery model, it can also enhance agility and speed-to-market. Typically, such an architecture leads to up to an 18% reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO).


The key factors include architecture principles and robust governance, availability and tiering, performance with respect to reserved IOPS and SSD vs. HDD, standardized DevOps tooling for faster go-to-market time, faster mean time to recovery (MTTR), improved deployment frequency, and lower failure rate of new releases, storage types suited for different forms of data, and optimizing data-transfer costs.


Applying continuous governance measuring and monitoring:

In order to ensure effective governance, it is important to measure and monitor the cost of services on a continuous basis. Automated reports and analysis can provide valuable insights that can help to reduce unit costs and promote transparency on costs and consumption. This can be achieved by establishing defined key performance indicators (KPIs) that provide regular feedback on performance.


It's important to automate routine checks and conduct predictive analysis to identify potential waste. Additionally, cost reports should be augmented with total cost of ownership (TCO) factors such as network, labor, and licenses.


Cost-efficiency metrics should be published to promote transparency and accurate CMDB (Configuration Management Database) records should be maintained. Non-productive staff should be reallocated to drive out full-time equivalent (FTE) costs. Finally, introducing a Cloud Center of Excellence or cloud business office roles and enforcing strict governance policies can ensure cost optimization.


What are the reasons behind waste? There are several factors involved, including:


- Disruption of traditional IT models

- Constant delivery of new services, which limits standardization

- Easy procurement and lack of controls over-provisioning

- Complex billing and usage structures

- Limited insights into usage and spending optimization

- Complexity due to the use of multiple cloud providers

- Limited tools for automating controls and corrective actions

- Limited transparency and accountability

- Failure to take advantage of favourable pricing models and discounts.


In identifying areas of waste, consider factors such as:


- Underutilized or unscheduled resources

- Absence of auto-scaling during peak periods

- Selection of inappropriate storage classes

- Overlooking volume and purchase-commitment discounts

- Management of software licensing in the cloud

- Inefficiently designed workloads


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◼ Click here to learn more about the training we offer: https://www.thehacktivists.in/trainings

◼ Click here to learn more about the training for cyber security managers: https://www.thehacktivists.in/courses

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