Provisioning

At first glance, using only what we need might look pretty simple. Unfortunately, workloads are not usually static and most IT organizations have to deal with a constant barrage of new project requests and surprises. On the upside, the cloud was built for this.

On the downside, it can be challenging to make sure we are keeping the waste to a minimum. Additionally, many companies do not have a good handle on all their applications, uses, and computing needs when considering a migration into the cloud. Typically, this is a side effect of the traditional provisioning mentality (over-build for safety, so that we don't need to go back and ask for more money).

Storage

So, how can we figure out how much we need? Well, for items like storage, that’s usually a pretty simple statistic. We likely know exactly how much space is in use on our attached drives, NAS or SAN. The next question, though, is whether that consumed storage is being efficiently used.

For most organizations, the majority of their disk-based storage is not accessed regularly. As such, this data can potentially be offloaded to services like S3 or Glacier for a cheaper cost per gigabyte. The following decision tree can help decide which equivalent AWS storage type would be the most cost-effective.