How to Reduce Multi-Cloud Costs with Kyndryl and CloudWize

Reducing cloud costs is never an easy journey, especially if you run your applications on multiple Hyperscalers. However, reducing costs while maintaining application performance and slowing engineering from building new features and services is essential.

Recent studies show that 42% of enterprise companies struggle to deal with cloud cost and reduce it over time. Enterprise companies implement a multi-cloud strategy, meaning they need to manage their billing accounts on at least two cloud service providers, such as AWS and Google Cloud. According to Gartner, 81% of cloud users work with two or more cloud service providers. Enterprises want flexibility and to move between clouds for multiple reasons starting with efficiency, using the best-of-breed cloud-native services for each application. They don’t want to lock themselves in with only one cloud provider.

Managing and monitoring your cloud cost should be an ongoing procedure. Cloud management platforms can help enterprises to maximize their cloud investments and optimize their cloud infrastructure. In addition to the cloud cost management tools, you need to make sure that you have a cloud center of excellence. Why? Because then, your team can build a strategy around the cloud architecture and make their job easier by picking the right cloud-native infrastructure components. This will help them make better decisions based on cost.

How to Reduce the Cloud Cost with CloudWize and Kyndryl

The key to reducing cloud costs is to have the right tools for the visibility of your cloud infrastructure components. The top hyperscalers have hundreds of cloud-native services, but they need to be optimized to reduce and manage costs on multiple hyperscalers.

CloudWize is a much better solution than anything hyperscalers have to offer. Besides their penetration testing and security assessment capabilities, they have cost management capabilities that collect your cloud components data that are being used, analyzes them, and provides visibility to uncover hidden cloud cost and enable best practices for efficiency and optimization. As a result, you can reduce up to 70% of your cloud environment’s cost by using CloudWize.

CloudWize can give FinOps and Cloud Architects the confidence to identify the waste of cloud resources and change the architecture based on it.

In the screenshot below, you can see the dashboard with the cost overview.

Here are a few tips and strategies for how to reduce cloud:

Reducing your multi-cloud migration cost

Moving workloads between hyperscalers and managing multiple cloud environments is a challenging task. In addition, the implications of being completely cloud agnostic and building your architecture on managed Kubernetes can increase the cost of the operations. Yet once you’ve decided to take the multi-cloud strategy, you should invest time and effort to reduce the cost of migration and the network between the hyperscalers.

This may be achieved, for example, by the following steps:

• Implementing open-source tools such as Kubernetes, Helm, and cloud-agnostic 3rd party solutions.
• Build a stateless microservices architecture and deploy each one on a container.
• Use Managed Kubernetes for cloud-native microservices.
• Use cloud providers’ managed cloud-native services for migration, such as Database Migration Services, migration VM to the container, etc…

You should remember that using multi-clouds and shifting workloads between clouds can increase your cloud cost significantly.

Choosing the right Hyperscaler

You would be amazed to learn how many companies choose their cloud providers based on criteria that have little to do with their business needs. If we ever needed proof that brand awareness is real, the fact that a well-known name is enough for some businesses would be it. Some receive a welcome package with free credit from a provider early on in their journey and never look into it again. If this sounds familiar, it’s time to ask some hard questions, make long-term plans, evaluate the different specialties of each provider, learn how each service will behave on different platforms, and study the payment and service terms. There’s no rule of thumb here, and you’ll need to consider what the answer to the above questions means specifically for your company. Yes, there are definitely differences in service levels, features, and components, but the idea is to make sure you choose the provider(s) according to your actual needs.

Optimizing Your Cloud Environment

Whether you choose to work with one cloud service or several, certain elements in each individual cloud will influence the cost and must be considered as well:

• Be aware of any change that might impact your budget significantly
• Use Spot Instances for non-production environments
• Transform whatever you learn after analyzing your bill into “active policy”
• Resource mapping: Know and tag your resources to locate ones that are unused or idle
• Shutdown unused compute resources after working hours and on the weekends
• Carefully consider reserved instances/saving plans for servers that you plan to use for the long run

In the screenshot below, you can see your billing account per month and set a policy.

Choose the right Hyperscaler for the mission

You’d be amazed to learn how many companies choose their cloud providers based on criteria that have little to do with their business needs. If we ever needed proof that brand awareness is real, the fact that a well-known name is enough for some businesses would be it. Some receive a welcome package with free credit from a provider early on in their journey and never look into it again. If this sounds familiar, it’s time to ask some hard questions, make long-term plans, evaluate the different specialties of each provider, learn how each service will behave on different platforms, and study the payment and service terms. There’s no rule of thumb here, and you’ll need to consider what the answer to the above questions means specifically for your company. Yes, there are definitely differences in service levels, features, and components, but the idea is to make sure you choose the provider(s) according to your actual needs. No more, no less.

Choose the right partner

You should choose the cloud partner based on their experts, experience, certifications, and global footprint. Asking for reviewing a few use cases is super important. Many partners can say that they have experience with cost optimization, cloud security, and adding AI capabilities to your applications, but you must check and even ask for a reference.

Kyndryl is the world’s largest IT solution provider. Our team has years of cloud experience and FinOps experts who can guide you through this journey. In addition, we are working closely with the top hyperscalers. Our mission is to help enterprise customers transform their business using the best-of-breed cloud-native technology and best practices.

The partnership between Kyndryl and CloudWize

Last month we announced that Kyndryl and CloudWize had entered a strategic partnership to help bring cloud security and compliance to more businesses in Israel, across the CEE&EM region, and globally. The agreement brings together CloudWize, an innovative agentless cloud solution that enables companies to have maximum cloud security and compliance from architecture design to runtime, and Kyndryl’s global leadership in IT infrastructure services to help companies across the industries to unlock business value and strengthen growth in a secure and compliant way.

Kyndryl chose CloudWize for its vast range of capabilities, such as full observability, cloud vulnerability scanning, and unique investigation abilities that help detect, understand the context and fix cloud risks in minutes. In addition, CloudWize is the only platform to visually display the connections between cloud security to compliance, performance, cost, business impact, and operations. With the evolved Identity and Access Management (IAM), change tracker, web app penetration test, alerts, insights, and auto-remediation, it’s the complete cloud security center of excellence that every company needs.

Conclusion

If you want to save a significant amount of your company budget, work with a partner with the right experience and implement a cloud platform like CloudWize. There are tons of cost optimization tools, techniques, and best practices from cloud service providers that you can use to reduce your cost and optimize your cloud resources.