eBook
Controlling Cloud Costs with Capacity Management
Capacity management has been used for decades to optimize resources on-premise. Now, as cloud environments transform IT, this practice is being extended to enable holistic planning, management, and optimization of all your resources — both cloud and on-premise — in one place and at the same time.
Effectively managing cloud capacity to avoid extra spending must be a focus for today’s companies. Most of the organizations are switching to the cloud and enjoying its low-cost advantages, but at the same time, they need to establish processes and controls to ensure you are efficiently utilizing all the benefits of the cloud, which means capacity planners will need to update their skills. Today, environments are far more complex and there is an increasing need for capacity planners to keep up-to-date with how the cloud has changed the IT landscape.
In a recent Precisely survey, customers listed Capacity Management as one of the top challenges they were struggling with related to their cloud environments. According to Gartner, approximately 28 percent of server capacity currently goes unused, as well as 40 percent of storage. As applications move to the public cloud, capacity management can help you understand what on-premises resources can be decommissioned and how to optimally restack on-premises workloads on the resources that remain.
Preventing waste is a key goal of capacity management — but it’s also essential to ensure adequate capacity for the applications and services that run on cloud resources. The objective is to get the most for your cloud spend while ensuring a good experience for customers and business users. In order to accomplish this, your capacity management tool needs to scan your current environment usage for configuration corrections that can be applied to improve the performance of cloud- based services. Additionally, it needs to identify possible configuration remediations to enable performance improvements. Your capacity management solution should help you identify additional opportunities for efficiency or performance enhancement, such as identifying resources not properly decommissioned or resources still available but not in use. Finally, you need to implement new polices based on the data you are collecting to improve sizing, handling unused or overprovisioned capacity, and so on.
Read on to learn what it means to extend capacity management to the cloud and how it differs from traditional on-premise capacity management.
