Month: December 2015

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides something that many companies couldn’t otherwise afford; servers on demand, scalability and flexibility.

Whilst provisioning servers from AWS can be considered a cheaper option than investing in the hardware, there are still cost factors that can easily spiral out of control if not monitored.

Some might see the answer to cutting these costs as scaling down some of the servers to save money (this is a great way to cut cost and waste but only if the servers being scaled down aren’t needed) or using cloud management tools to cut the hours that you actually pay for. These are both great options but to work well for a company, there needs to be a proper understanding of how everything works and where the cost is being spent.

It usually depends who is in charge of the budget for IT in a company but there can often be a divide between those provsioning servers and the person budgeting for them. Whilst the person provisioning the servers needs to have an understanding of the costs being incurred by what they’re doing, it is the person budgeting for them who needs to have a real understanding for how the costs work, the ROI of the servers and how money can be saved.

In order to scale down servers, terminate servers or use cloud management tools, education is needed on the part of the finance person so they can confidently make decisions on how best to save money.

The answer might not actually be to scale down all the servers but might be to schedule certain servers to only be on at certain times. As on-demand Amazon EC2 servers are charged per hour for the entire time they are on, turning them off when they’re not in use can save money and reduce waste.

The first thing to learn as the person budgeting for these servers is how the costs work and what you’re actually being charged for (How Amazon EC2 Pricing Works). From there, you can begin to breakdown where the charges are coming from. Working out the ROI of a server is a little bit harder but once you understand all of the costs and how to reduce them, you can start to work out how to increase the ROI.

It doesn’t stop at costs though, actually understanding what the different types of servers do can help to work out where there might be wastage. Utilisation monitoring will help to work out what the servers are being used for and whether they are being used efficiency or whether an extra large server is being used for 2 hours a week at only 20% capacity. In this case, it’s likely that there is a lot of wastage and it might make sense to scale down to a slightly smaller server. Couple this with scheduling or on-demand usage of the server and you can reduce cost, wastage and improve the ROI of the server.

Cloud computing is often a way for start ups to scale quickly and work on larger projects as needed without incurring the large costs of hardware. But, for any start-up to use cloud servers successfully, they need to read around the best ways to provsion servers from Amazon and the best way to cut the costs and wastage from the start so it doesn’t become an issue. The same goes for any company that already recognises AWS costs could become or have become an issue.

You can learn more about server costs, reducing costs and understanding how AWS works on the CMM Blog or from the AWS EC2 Getting Started Page.

Cloud Machine Manager (CMM) is a cloud management tool that can help you control and reduce AWS EC2 costs without the need for lots of technical knowledge. Schedule servers or use the on-demand on/off button to ensure the servers are only on when needed, saving money and reducing waste. See how much you could be saving here.

Cloud computing is widely considered to be the ultimate business tool. Its business uses vary from storage and computing power, to enabling remote desktop for a user away from the office, but it is undoubtedly a powerful business tool.

The advances in the Internet of Things (IoT) and the cloud infrastructure are also creating a future proof business tool that will collaborate with parts of everyday life. It all sounds really cool and futuristic until you start to add up the costs.

Before going on to say how you can control cloud computing costs, it’s important to consider why they are ‘out-of-control’ in the first place. On the billing FAQ page for Amazon Web Services (AWS), they put unexpected costs down to misunderstanding or resource configuration issues.

They’re probably not wrong. Misunderstanding is an easy way to lose control. Misunderstanding can easily stem from miscommunication between the user spinning up the cloud computing servers and the finance person who actually has to pay the invoice.

So if it is all down to a ‘simple misunderstanding’ as Amazon puts it, what is the answer to keeping cloud computing costs under control?

Tracking and Monitoring Usage

If bills are higher than you expected or budgeted for, you need to get to the root of the problem. Gain some control by tracking and monitoring the usage of the different servers you are running. For Amazon’s EC2 servers, you can get usage reports so you can see what’s going on for the individual instances and how they’re being used.

By monitoring this information, you can gain visibility on where the cloud computing budget is being spent and then start to think about how the company can be more efficient in provisioning servers. Maybe there are even extra servers that were never included in the original budget but have been provisioned since!

Terminating or Scaling Down Under-Utilised Servers

As part of your monitoring, you might find there are some servers that are being under-utilised. Perhaps you have a large computing server that isn’t being utilised and could be replaced by a smaller server or even terminated if the need isn’t there any more.

You can usually terminate or scale down a server through the server provider control panel or console and once the server is terminated, the charges for that server should be stopped.

It’s actually quite common for a business to spin up a new server for a project or the development of an app and when the project is finished, the server is still left on, running in the background and costing you money. These need to be controlled and shut down to reduce the costs of cloud computing.

Determine how many servers you need

There are some cases where you are running over or too close to budget on servers but all of the servers are in use to some extent. In this case, communication with the development/IT team or users is needed. They will be able to give you a better idea of what servers are being used for and how they can be optimised for better control and cost savings.

This might mean shutting down a couple of servers and replacing them with one server that can run everything. It will depend on what the different servers are being used for but it’s possible that scaling up for efficiency or down if servers are under-utilised can save some money.

Cloud Computing Management Tools 

Another way to take more control over your cloud computing costs is cloud management tools. There is a good chance you’ve come across this if you’ve looked for cost saving options online.

Cloud Computing Management Tools can offer different features from monitoring usage to scheduling servers to switch off when they they’re not needed. Both of these aspects can help control the costs of the different servers.

It’s important to consider how these tools scale with your business and the costs involved. There is no point paying more for the tool than you would get in savings.

It’s also important not to underestimate the total cost of cloud computing and unfortunately it’s not as simple as just saying; ‘we need this, let’s spin up three large servers’. There are considerations that need to be taken into account in order to budget, for example; regions, server type (compute, storage, memory etc.), platform (Windows, Linux, SQL – the server price can change based on this) and what sort of price packages you go for.

As Amazon states in their FAQs, simple misunderstanding can lead to unexpected bills and in turn this leads to a loss of control of cloud computing budgeting and finance.

Cloud Machine Manager (CMM) is a cloud management tool that could save you as much as 90% on your Amazon EC2 costs. Through server scheduling, servers switching off based on usage and an instant on/off switch, cost control can be regained. See how much you can save with our savings estimator.

Trying to control organizational costs is not an easy task for any business owner as it can be quite difficult to know where to start. But there are ways to reduce your organizational costs without affecting the quality of your output, starting with managing your cloud costs.

By keeping an eye on a few aspects of your cloud computing strategy, you can reduce your operating costs and save massively on your bills. With AWS EC2, this includes assessing cost aspects of on-demand instances, dedicated instances and spot instances and seeing where you can make savings.

On-demand pricing

With on-demand instances, compute capacity can be purchased by the hour. But there are a few things you need to look out for, including how prices vary according to AWS region and operating system used.

For example, a t2.small instance on a Linux operating system within the US East (N. Virginia) AWS region is priced at $0.026 per hour when purchased on demand. But when we go to the West coast to Northern California, the price increases to $0.034 per hour.

Looking at these numbers, the difference in pricing doesn’t look like a lot. But let’s put this in a situational context. Say a company in Northern Virginia provision 100 t2.small instances to run for 40 hours per week every month. That comes up to $4,992 per year. But if the same company was operating in Northern California with the same EC2 demands, the cost would be $6,528. So running these instances from the East to West coast, the cost increases by around $1500.

And if this company was using a Windows operating system, the cost in Northern Virginia would be $6,912 per year. The cost in Northern California would be $8,448 – that’s almost double the cost compared to a Linux operating system on the East coast.

So when purchasing AWS instances, keep in mind the regional costs of that instance and the operating system you are using. This is especially important for start-ups who need to keep tight control over their finances and ensure resources are used wisely.

Dedicated instances

Dedicated instances are a form of EC2 instances that are dedicated to you as a single customer. These instances are physically isolated from any instances you have provisioned that are not dedicated, and are isolated from instances belonging to other AWS accounts.

You can launch these instances from dedicated hosts, allowing you to consistently use the same server over and over again. This way you can ensure that you are adhering to corporate standards and regulatory requirements concerning visibility over instance location.

And when it comes to pricing, regardless of the size of instances you provision, you pay hourly for each dedicated host that is active and aren’t billed for instance usage. But keep an eye out for the new Reservation pricing that AWS will be releasing, which promises a discount of up to 70% compared to on-demand prices.

Spot instances

Spot instances are a great way to obtain EC2 instances without breaking the bank. Essentially you bid on unused EC2 instances at prices set by AWS that change according to demand. What’s great about spot instances is that you can reduce your operating costs by up to 90% compared to on-demand instances.

But there are a few things you need to look out for with spot instances. The price for instances can vary based on the overall demand for instances, so you may end up seeing price hikes and pay a little more than you would like when demand is higher.

The other thing is that if the spot price increases above your bid for that instance, AWS will terminate that instance. But don’t worry as AWS will give you a termination notice before they terminate the instance. So as long as you keep track of these factors, you should be able to save on your AWS bills and reduce your costs.

There are also other ways to save on your AWS EC2 bills, including the use of cloud management software such as Cloud Machine Manager (CMM). CMM is the cloud on-off switch that gives you greater control of when your EC2 servers are turned on and off.

With CMM, you can schedule and automate your server activity as well as turn your servers off instantaneously, with the potential to save enough money to reinvest in provisioning bigger and better servers.

To see how much you can save with Cloud Machine Manager, check out our savings estimator.

Cloud computing is one of the hottest topics in computing technology today. But with all the different tech sites and forums out there (which aren’t always easy to understand) where do you go to get all of your information about the latest developments in cloud computing?

We’ve put together a list of who we think are some of the brightest and most informed minds when it comes to cloud computing. So if you’re looking for the most up-to-date commentary on cloud computing developments, check out these experts.

1) Louis Columbus – @LouisColumbus

Louis is a leading expert in enterprise software, and has been a regular contributor to Forbes Magazine for the last 4 years, covering topics from CRM to cloud computing. And with such great insights into cloud computing, Louis was the Keynote at the Cloud Computing Expo Europe in March earlier this year.

2) Richi Jennings – @RiCHi

As former CTO of Samsung Contact, part of Richi’s job was to write simplified articles about some pretty technical stuff. So when Richi writes about the latest news in cloud security etc. for Computerworld, you’ll find what he writes about is engaging and easily digestible.

3) Jeff Barr – @jeffbarr

As Chief Evangelist at Amazon Web Services (AWS) since 2012, Jeff writes up-to-date and interesting blogs about how AWS are successfully continuing to develop new services that improve AWS users’ experiences of the cloud. Jeff has played and continues to play a significant role in the global growth of AWS.

4) Werner Vogels – @Werner

Being VP and CTO of Amazon.com pretty much tells you all you need to know about how qualified Werner is when it comes to cloud computing. Werner has been instrumental in AWS’ approach to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), helping to make AWS one of the leading cloud service providers.

5) David Linthicum – @DavidLinthicum

David is widely considered as one of the top global experts in cloud computing. The founder of Blue Mountain labs, a cloud computing consultancy and development company, David is a frequent contributor to InfoWorld. He regularly discusses cloud computing security, providing sound advice on how to best utilize the cloud.

6) Ben Kepes – @benkepes

Ben’s passion for technology coupled with his entrepreneurial spirit makes him the go-to resource for any business wanting to learn more about cloud computing and its impact on business organizations. As a regular contributor to Forbes, NetworkWorld and ComputerWorld, Ben shares his insights of developments in cloud computing, including cloud security.

So the next time you hear about any new developments in the world of cloud computing, be sure to check out what these guys have to say about it.

I read recently that within 20 years, offices won’t exist. Or at least, they won’t exist in the way we know and use them today. Offices will become spaces that represent a brand headquarters that can be used as temporary workspaces and for meetings, a more extreme example of hot-desking.

But why is this? The Internet and the cloud are allowing for more flexibility and mobility within business. Couple that with scalability and we are seeing small businesses starting to thrive and expand into global businesses.

That isn’t to say they’re suddenly becoming huge corporations, but rather that technology has endorsed a global solution for business, whereby members of a team can be spread around the world with little effect on day-to-day business.

If anything, the global nature of the business of the future is helping small companies find new audiences and customers that they never could have found before. They are exploring new opportunities for different markets around the world without needing to be a large organisation. And cloud computing is leading the way in building global businesses.

Here are three of the ways cloud computing is influencing growth of global companies:

1) Flexibility

The cloud has provided something that past ways of working couldn’t allow: flexibility. Fifteen years ago, the Internet wasn’t good enough for an employee to tell their boss: “I’m working from home next week.”

It would have caused trouble and there would have been difficulty accessing files and programs. But today, and even more so in the years to come, an employee could effectively only work from home. This is because of the flexibility of the cloud and what it offers paired with a change in industry that see more technology and Internet reliant jobs being created all the time.

You can access files and programs over the Internet and even use remote desktop so things are the same as if you were in the office. Home offices will more rapidly become popular in the coming years, and that will lead the way for global growth.

The flexibility of the cloud can even allow employees to work in a different country or continent without negatively affecting the work being done.

2) Scalability

Scalability, offered by cloud computing, is generally leading to the growth of companies. Without the need to buy expensive hardware, it is easier than ever to upgrade server and computing power at a low cost.

As well as scaling the technical infrastructure of the business, the cloud is allowing for growth in other areas. Where money might be saved on hardware costs, money might be invested in people. And due to the flexible and mobile nature of cloud computing, those people can be located anywhere in the world. It opens opportunities to hire the perfect person whilst also expanding into a new market that was otherwise unreachable.

3) Mobility

Mobility is possibly the key to how cloud computing is influencing the growth of global businesses. I came across an example of a tech start-up that has a HQ based in China, a CEO based in Thailand and then developers and marketers dotted around South America and Europe.

Their own view was that the entire business had become more like a global sales team, spread around the world because the tech allowed them to do so. The CEO travels the world week-by-week visiting team members and selling their product to new markets because the mobility of the infrastructure they use allows them to.

Even some airlines have Wi-Fi meaning the 8-hour flight from London to New York becomes prime time to do some work, uninterrupted by phone calls.

But the really interesting thing about this company is they are only made up of about ten people, but each person is based in a different country.

Only a few years ago, we would have considered this inconceivable but with advances in tech and cloud computing, it’s possible for anyone to work anywhere around the world as if they were in the office next door.

Cost is still a factor many businesses have to consider when upgrading and adopting the cloud. In many ways, it reduces the overall infrastructure cost and despite it being a powerful business tool that provides flexibility, scalability and mobility and therefore global growth, there can be a lot of expense if it’s not managed properly.

Over-provisioning is a common issue. It occurs when companies spin-up lots of new servers in the cloud, for example with Amazon Web Services, and then pay the cost when these servers are left on for 24 hours a day for the duration of a project or build.

However, this can be avoided through server management and cloud management tools (such as CMM) and shouldn’t be something that discourages companies from adopting the cloud and allowing for growth, possibly into the global market!

See what CMM can do for your business and how much money you can save with our savings estimator.

As companies expand and increase their workload, there can be a growing need for IT infrastructure. Servers might be considered to store files or run applications.

We also have to consider technology start-ups and small businesses that need server space to test and run applications they’re developing. The trouble is the cost of server infrastructure isn’t cheap. In fact it’s quite the opposite when you take the full list of factors into account.

Not only do you have to consider the servers (how does it need to be optimised? Compute? Storage? Memory?), you have to consider the software, the room for the servers, appropriate storage racks, cabling, electricity and vitally, cooling.

If your company is at a growth stage, it’s likely you will keep growing for the foreseeable future, which could mean more servers and more space needed. As you expand your server numbers, you need extra hands to maintain them meaning more salaries to pay.

It all stacks up to be a huge cost that continues to increase as the company expands. But with cloud computing, you can eliminate these unnecessary infrastructure costs and stay on top of your spending.

Growth and expansion is a good thing, but wastage, and expanding faster than the company can afford is damaging.

IaaS is the Answer

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) can effectively eliminate the cost of hosting server hardware. There isn’t the same need to maintain the servers and there is no upfront cost for the servers.

Using cloud servers also means the server room that you would have needed can become a meeting room or extra office space, or even better, a games room with a pool table and comfy chairs.

Either way, what could have been considered a very expensive room that hosted your servers and needed to be kept cool with additional cooling units can now be freed up in terms of both cost and space.

IaaS also supports growth, arguably in a more viable and affordable way than server hardware. To spin up new servers costs a fraction of the price and scaling can be achieved easily as needed.

What infrastructure do you need for the Cloud?

You need a computer and good Internet. There isn’t much more to it.

Using cloud services such as Amazon Web Services allows you to spin up a server as and when you need, use it for as long as you need and then close it down again.

Disaster Recovery and Continuity

Another consideration many businesses make when expanding is disaster recovery and continuity planning. If you’re housing all of your data and applications on locally hosted servers and a fire or flood or earthquake happens, there is the potential for loss of data.

Because of this, back-up servers hosted elsewhere may need to be thought about. If this is something the company, again, decides to invest in hardware for, the cost rises.

Cloud computing once again eliminates this need for extra infrastructure. There is a lot less chance of something happening to the server farm that Amazon host compared to the small server room you might have in the back.

How Cloud Computing Eliminates Infrastructure Costs

Cloud computing isn’t the answer to everyone’s problems. There will still be barriers for some companies, for example compliance and regulations around data and where files are stored can persuade businesses to stick with local hardware.

But, for a technology start-up or small business who need to keep an eye on capital expenditure, cloud computing is the way to eliminate infrastructure costs and still gain access to the computing power and storage they need for their business.

Developers can spin up servers of different sizes as and when they need them without the hassle of investing time and effort in setting up new hardware on-site. Whilst eliminating infrastructure costs, cloud computing also offers the scalability that many businesses look for when expanding.

Learn how Cloud Machine Manager could be saving you money on AWS costs and see how much you could save with our savings estimator.

It’s easy to miss the many updates that Amazon push each month. In November, the Amazon EC2 services saw updates to the AWS Elastic Beanstalk, dedicated hosts, Spot Instances and more.

Here are some of the Amazon EC2 updates that you may have missed:

1) Amazon EC2 High I/O Instances are now available as Spot Instances

In case you’re not sure, Spot Instances allow you to bid on spare EC2 computing capacity. They’re one of the options for provisioning Amazon EC2 servers that aim to save you money by bidding what you want to pay.

Amazon rolled out an update so that Spot Instances now support the EC2 storage-optimised, high I/O i2 instance types. This means you can now bid for spare capacity on i2 servers, potentially saving money if you need storage optimised servers.

2) Elastic Beanstalk Added Detailed Health Metrics to the Management Console 

An interesting update was made to AWS Elastic Beanstalk in that it now lets you view detailed health metrics for your apps from the Elastic Beanstalk Management console.

This includes a health status, metrics and causes for your individual EC2 instances within your environments.

With this update, you no longer have to manually monitor application metrics to see if your application is performing as expected. Elastic Beanstalk does this on your behalf and will change the environment health status to warn of any anomalies. Find out more details about this update, here.

3) AWS Elastic Beanstalk Support Added for Environmental Links

Another AWS Elastic Beanstalk update in November includes the addition of support for environmental links. Where previously you had to manually hardcode links between components, which made management and updates difficult, you can now create and model links between different application components when developing apps in Elastic Beanstalk.

Links between application components are modelled using the AWS Management Console, CLI, or SDK.

4) Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts

Later in the month, we saw the introduction of Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts, which are physical servers with EC2 instance capacity fully dedicated for your use. Dedicated Hosts could help to reduce costs, allowing you to use existing server-bound software licenses, such as; Windows Server, SQL Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

This AWS update allows you to reliably spin up EC2 instances on the same physical server over time. It will give visibility over how your Dedicated Hosts are utilised and what has been installed on the server.

The bring-your-own-licence (BYOL) method can help minimise licencing costs and help address compliance and regulation requirements.

5) Use AWS Config to track EC2 Instances on Dedicated Hosts 

Along with the Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts update came the AWS Config update that allows you to assess licence compliance on Dedicated Hosts by turning on recording for instances and hosts.

Through recording when instances are launched, stopped or terminated on a Dedicated Host, and pairing the information with host and instance information (including: Host ID, Amazon Machine Image IDs, number of sockets and physical cores), AWS Config becomes a data source for licence reporting.

Whilst these are just five of the updates you may have missed for Amazon EC2, Amazon are constantly working on improving and updating AWS and you can find a full list of updates here.

If you don’t work within an I.T department, discussing your company’s cloud setup can sometimes make you wish you had an AWS dictionary. Frequent use of acronyms, jargon, and AWS terminology, will often leave you with more questions than you originally started with.

Cloud jargon, alongside a lack of common knowledge, will often lead many to believe the technology is more complicated than it actually is. Yet, within a financial or managerial role, AWS plays an increasingly important role in business objectives, and it’s therefore vital to have some understanding of AWS terminology.

How does AWS affect my business?

If you’re having to brush-up on your cloud language, it’s likely your company’s AWS setup could be an area of concern – perhaps due to a problem occurring.

Problems encountered with AWS might include:

1. Increased AWS bills, as servers are switched on but not actually used.
2. Poor cost clarity, as management is locked within I.T.
3. Developers request bigger servers, as slow speeds are affecting development.

It could even be the case that a developer could have flagged a particular issue, or a senior director / business owner may have identified that increasing costs have affected the bottom line, and have asked you to investigate.

If untreated, the long-term implications of such problems will often increase the total cost of ownership (TCO) attached to AWS, in-turn lowering your campaign budgets, and putting a strain on available resources which delay project completion.

But the cloud isn’t my field – why bother learning jargon?

Believing that cloud-related responsibilities are just for the I.T department is perhaps wrong, and as AWS continues to grow (currently 81% year-on-year), it pays to invest some time to understand what underlying terms associated with the ‘Cloud’, AWS, and EC2 actually mean.

Alongside this, cloud stakeholders should ideally extend beyond the I.T group and throughout all departments who utilise the cloud. Creating a culture of responsibility that actually makes real changes towards cloud efficiency – as supported by Michelle Boisvert from TechTarget

Nonetheless, jargon has become so implicit within cloud-computing, that for anyone other than a developer, it can be tricky to pick-up the fundamentals.

In the likely event you’ll have to find a solution and engage with developers to implement a course of action, learning jargon provides benefits to understanding more detailed cloud discussions – which allows for more dynamic and valuable conversations with your developers. Plus it makes you look more informed to senior managers!

10 easy examples

To help establish your jargon vocabulary, we’ve already done some of the hard work for you and prepared a list of easy-to-digest I.T terms for cloud beginners.

#1 The ‘Cloud’: Cloud Computing – Rather than use physical servers on your premises, using the ‘cloud’ just means using a network of remote serves hosted on the internet.

#2 AWS: Amazon Web Services – This is Amazon’s collection of cloud and web service offerings, one of which is EC2.

#3 EC2: Elastic Compute Cloud – This is the AWS cloud compute offering, where users can pay for computing servers to test and run applications.

#4 Public Cloud – a model in which third-party service providers (like Amazon)offers storage, servers, and applications to the general public over the internet, usually on a pay-as-you-go basis.

#5 Private Cloud – a model in which your company has a private cloud setup behind a corporate firewall

#6 Hybrid Cloud – a mix of both public and private cloud models, where usage alternates depending on demand.

#7 Big Data – a large volume of data that cannot be easily processed or integrated, but still contains valuable insights.

#8 DevOps (Development and Operations) – a phrase used to describe the relationship between both the development and operations departments, with the goal of improving agile communications between them.

#9 IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) – a service distribution model of cloud computing that provides virtualised computing resources, such as storage and processing over the internet.

#10 IoT (Internet of Things) – a concept where the growing amount of physical ‘things’, like everyday objects, can connect to the internet and exchange data.

Extra AWS Resource!

#11: To help support your AWS knowledge even further, we’ve also developed an AWS Jargon webpage and Infographic, with a range of other learnable terms (except for 2) – ideal for printing out and using as an AWS resource later on!

However, if you’re searching for a very particular term, we’d recommend visiting Amazon’s own glossary page, which provides a comprehensive list of all AWS terms.

Thanks – but what if I need more help?

If you don’t understand all of these terms straight away, don’t worry – you’re not trying to become an expert! At least now you’ll be able to talk these topics through with a developer, and be better placed to provide useful suggestions.

In turn, the value this knowledge provides is that it enables you to process cloud discussions and communicate with other technicians, without having to pause and check a specific term – saving you valuable time that your busy schedule doesn’t allow for!

If you’ve been researching AWS terminology in relation to a potential cost-efficiency problem, then it might be worth checking out Cloud Machine Manager. CMM is a cost-saving software tool that provides ‘real’ on-demand control, automation, and scheduling for AWS EC2 servers, allowing you to switch them off when they’re no longer needed, and with the potential to reduce your AWS EC2 bills by 90%.

Efficiency and cost reductions are something every business strives for in order to improve everyday business operations, but this can sometimes involve large upfront investments in cost saving strategies that give little reward. Cloud computing can offer a sustainable and long term strategy to increase organizational efficiency and cost management.

Here are 5 of the benefits cloud computing can offer including how migrating to the cloud can help your business.

1) Provision as necessary 

As a business grows, it might look to scale up server usage as testing and development requirements increase. With cloud computing, this is made easy through provisioning more servers of the same size or larger servers if necessary. Equally, reducing server usage is made easy through scaling servers down.

The benefits of such scalability is that you only pay for the resources that your company uses, saving money that can be more efficiently used.

A critical mistake many organizations make is leaving unused servers switched on, and so they end up paying for server activity that they are not actually using. However with Cloud Machine Manager, you can turn servers off on-demand, ensuring you only pay for the server activity you use, generating huge cost savings. What’s more, you can then use these cost savings to reinvest in bigger and better servers as your business grows, effectively earning yourself a free upgrade. Not too shabby.

2) Reduced spending on infrastructure

One of the great things about cloud computing is that a business can avoid large investments in hardware and infrastructure. Rather than purchasing servers that take up space, take a while to be delivered and take even longer to configure, you can simply provision servers from cloud service providers off-site, saving money and time.

Another benefit of this is that cloud service providers are able to achieve huge economies of scale due to the large number of servers they have, meaning each server you provision is gained at a lower cost than if you purchase one in-house.

3) Improved accessibility

Cloud computing offers flexible working for users allowing them to work wherever and whenever they want across a variety of devices i.e. laptops, tablets etc (as long as they have an Internet connection and access to the cloud).

As part of the accessibility benefits, users can also easily share files and documents in the cloud, enabling teams to be more effective in their collaboration of projects, no matter the location of each individual team member.

4) Environmentally friendly

Moving to the cloud can help organizations save huge amounts of money in their energy bills as well as reduce their carbon footprint.

These benefits are achieved as an organization doesn’t need to invest in large machines, so you don’t need to spend money on running and maintaining this infrastructure. Instead, cloud service providers who house vast numbers of servers, are able to carefully control the temperature and humidity in server rooms to ensure servers can run at optimum performance.

Cloud service providers also run their infrastructure at more stable utilization levels compared to organizations employing in-house servers. So cloud service providers are able to perform the same tasks but using significantly fewer servers, achieving greater performance gains and more efficient server utilization. Ultimately, this helps to increase energy savings.

5) Cloud back-up and security

Losing a laptop with huge amounts of important data on it is a nightmare for businesses. But cloud computing offers great benefits in terms of ensuring your data does not get lost.

With your data stored in the cloud, you can gain access to it from any location and from any device, so even if a laptop is lost, it’s possible to access the data – all you need is an Internet connection.

Many cloud service providers use encryption, application-specific protection and server virtualization amongst other methods to keep data safe and reduce the chances of a data breach or loss of data.

So remember, 5 key benefits of cloud computing are;

• Provision as necessary – scale up or down server usage based on needs and only pay for what’s used
• Reduced spending on infrastructure – provision servers off-site and avoid the costs of purchasing and maintaining servers in-house
• Improved accessibility – as long as you have an Internet connection, you can access cloud servers from anywhere
• Environmentally friendly – save money and reduce your carbon footprint by taking advantage of cloud providers’ ability to run servers efficiently
• Cloud back-up and security – keep data safe in the cloud and access it anywhere

There are many tools that can help to reduce the costs and manage cloud servers, including Cloud Machine Manager (CMM). CMM uses scheduling and automation tools to give you control of when servers are switched on and off. The on-demand switch ensures that you are only billed for the time that your servers are actually being used. Try it out today risk free or see how much you could be saving with our savings estimator.