Business Case:
Cloud services offer scalable technological advantages, but underutilized resources lead to unnecessary costs. For businesses with significant cloud investments, auditing scalable resources and tracking utilization can be a challenge.
To monitor cloud utilization, some businesses upgrade existing on-premise resources. But this creates additional costs and is often unreliable. Other businesses implement cloud-based monitoring solutions, but without experience and planning, these also lead to higher costs and resource requirements.
MAQ Software used its cloud deployment experience to create a cloud-based solution that efficiently tracks resources and reduces expenditures.
Key Challenges:
- Track resources and implement a consumption model to optimize pay-as-you-go billing.
- Audit subscription for orphan resources, underutilized resources, or resources with high utilization.
- Security audit across the subscription for users and resources that are no longer needed.
Solution:
We developed processes and best practices that enable us to significantly reduce cloud expenditures for our clients. Additionally, we created reports to track resource status and utilization.
Key Highlights:
- Created Power BI reports over Azure OMS to track usage of resources.
- Automated allocation of resources to reduce costs.
- Implemented protocols and practices to track, monitor, and optimize usage of resources.
MAQ Software developed several reports and utilities to track and optimize resource usage. These cloud-based utilities periodically audit the resources to track utilization patterns and identify cost-saving opportunities.
Figure 1: Services and features used to audit cloud resources, access, and cost optimization
We also implemented best practices including automation scripts for turning off virtual machines outside of business hours and reviewing and decommissioning servers periodically, automation scripts to downgrade server usage on weekends, and automated daily Power BI reports for tracking cloud expenditures.
Business Outcome:
MAQ Software’s end-to-end solution reduced cloud costs and provided a unified platform to track and monitor resource usage.
Outcome Highlights:
- Easy to interpret Power BI reports tracking usage.
- Improved security and cost savings with Azure OMS.