While I was a Cloudability Technical Account Manager one of the savings that we noticed isn't covered as often were those created by managing your cloud storage policies.  There are bigger budget items, but expenses for storage can creep up surprisingly quickly.  Think of it this way… storage online is relatively cheap so sometimes we don't pay much attention to it.  Yet you're paying for this storage every day, every hour, every minute that ticks by.  Why wouldn't you want to make sure you're only paying for the storage you need?

If you haven't considered your storage policies recently here's a few questions to start you off.

• What can I delete? – Okay okay… I know this sounds obvious but pause for a second. Think about your own laptop or PC.  I'm guessing you have a folder marked "Archive" or "Old Desktop" or "Old Pictures" or something like that right?  How often have you actually looked at all those documents?  Storage at companies can be the same way, but instead, it can be a growth of clutter – and at scale. 

• What storage tiers are my data stored in? - Most of the major cloud vendors break their storage tiers into three settings… Frequent Access at a standard price, Infrequent Access at a discounted rate, and Archival storage at a deep discount but with limitations to data retrieval.  Cloud Vendors may call them different names – Azure refers to frequently accessed as Hot, while AWS for S3 calls it Standard, but they essentially mean the same thing.  This means that moving your regulatory, tax, or log files from a higher tier of storage to archival storage could provide you with real savings. 
  
  
• Rightsizing Storage in Cloudability – Currently Apptio Cloudability provides detail on managing your AWS S3 storage that takes away the guesswork of what changes may be needed.  It starts with the main KPIs, from left to right, with your total current spend, an estimate of what you could save by exercising the recommended rightsizing options, and an estimate for your projected spend once your storage is optimized. 

Besides just this information, there is also a detail page for each storage rightsizing recommendation.  This detailed breakout will give you all the data you may need to decide whether to act on the recommended rightsizing. 

I highly recommend talking with anyone on your Apptio teams if you'd like to dive into this deeper.  There are many more decisions to be made than I provided above, but hopefully, this will help you get started!  If you have any best practices at your own companies I may have missed please feel free to let us know below.

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Justin Kean
Apptio
Instructor
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#Cloudability