By Christopher Saul, Territory Sales Lead for East Africa at Red Hat

2022 was an incredible year for cloud computing in Kenya. While 2023 may see a slowdown in enterprises increasing their cloud spending, many businesses want to optimise their operations and ensure they get the best bang for their buck. This is a critical aspect of technology set to revolutionise industries during this decade. Surveys have shown that more than 30% of cloud spend in 2021 was wasted or inefficient.

Here are a few steps Kenyan enterprises can take to ensure their cloud spend is fully optimised and what options are available to help achieve long-term cost efficiency.

• Plan for the resources you need

Every enterprise must understand the resources needed to migrate and operate efficiently, from SMEs to legacy organisations.

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That involves proper planning. Enterprises should determine how many servers, application instances, and databases their IT department and teams require and how much memory and storage resources they need to achieve optimal performance and efficiency.

By knowing their capacity baseline, enterprises can consider cloud workload fluctuations and develop an accurate plan to meet their cloud computation and infrastructure needs.

• Choose reserved instances for long-term commitments.

Once you have established your cloud capacity baselines, it’s time to put ink to paper and seek cloud providers’ services. Knowing exactly what you want from them positions you to get the best deal for your enterprise.

Reserved instances are when enterprises can obtain a discount on cloud computing prices when they commit to a specific usage level over a specific period. This is an alternative to “on-demand” prices, meaning enterprises are only billed for their reserved capacity. Furthermore, they can alter instance sizes if they need to scale upwards or downwards.

Cloud providers offer period options and discounts based on the terms that enterprises will agree to. Enterprises should only consider this approach when it is financially worthwhile or when they are confident of the capacity they need and can commit to it.

• Implement rightsizing

Following a migration or over time, cloud resources can be under or over-provisioned, compromising an enterprise’s performance and cost efficiency. They must rightsize where possible and match instances with workload performance and capacity requirements. This involves analysing the usage and metrics of your cloud infrastructure, determining their efficiency and deciding on a course of action, and modifying the infrastructure based on those determinations.

Rightsizing also allows enterprises to deactivate or discard cloud resources that are no longer necessary. Cloud providers will continue to charge you based on those resources regardless of whether you’re using them, and the first step of any cost reduction process is cutting the dead weight.

• Consider spot instances

Offered by enterprise cloud providers and hyperscalers, spot instances are a purchasing option where providers will offer unused capacity for a reduced price (much lower than the on-demand price). A benefit of spot instances is that they can be launched immediately, as long as capacity is available, and they offer enterprises a cost-effective solution when they need flexibility in running their cloud applications.

Spot instances are commonly used for high-performance computing (HPC), in which organisations, such as financial service providers or scientific researchers, need a lot of capacity for short periods. Spot instances, such as web applications, are not ideal for real-time or critical services that organisations cannot afford to fail.

• Avoid unnecessary data transfers.

According to Gartner, one of the leading data and analytics trends in 2023 is data sharing, and organisations are sharing it internally and externally and offering it as a product. Data is becoming a valuable commodity in Kenya, with improved network productivity, government support, and the adoption of big data contributing to its value. But as enterprises use more data, they must be aware of its movement and how much moving it costs.

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Customers do not pay for what goes into the cloud, but they do pay for what comes out of it. Data transfer fees can be a primary factor for cloud computing costs. While data transfers between internal services in the same region do not usually incur costs, movement between regions and over the internet (for example, between a region to a cloud edge centre) can. And this is a cost that can spiral, depending on an enterprise’s reliance on data. Therefore, they must consider that traffic when seeking cloud computing vendors and solutions.

The cloud is not optimised once you’ve signed a contract. Enterprises must continually ensure their operations, workflows, and resources are optimised based on cost efficiency and value. With these steps, they can cement cloud infrastructure in their operations and become a leading example of a cloud-first business.