This is the third article in a series diving deep into the biggest differentiators of our Tangoe One Cloud expense management platform. When comparing Tangoe against other FinOps solution providers, take these items into consideration. Read articles one, two, four, and five.
Have you ever paused your gym membership or car insurance while you were away for a long period of time? Service pausing is a sound strategy for cloud services management, and it’s one of the leading ways IT leaders curb their cloud infrastructure expenses. However, putting this cost-optimization tool to good use isn’t as simple as hitting a pause button — especially when you have a variety of IaaS services and providers. Here’s how Tangoe’s FinOps solutions are designed to streamline this process with AI automation, bringing you the biggest cloud savings for the least amount of work.
IaaS Resources: On-Demand can Really Mean Off-Budget
Gartner reports that most IaaS deployments are ad hoc, hastily assembled, and poorly architected, leaving companies to pay the bill for virtual machines and servers running even when they may not necessarily be needed. The cloud’s on-demand services are flexible in nature and individual fees may feel negligible (a few cents charged per hour). However, fees add up and are often neglected during initial planning phases, despite cloud usage going in one direction – up! This explains why 60% of CIOs will encounter public cloud cost overruns that negatively impact their business.
IaaS instance pausing is a game changer because it reduces cloud waste by putting select services on hold for a specific amount of time. While IaaS services are stopped, companies can ensure they pay only for the infrastructure they need when they need it.
Key Benefits of Instance Pausing
- Cost Savings: Saves money by suspending inactive instances, and minimizing cloud resource usage during designated time slots, so IT leaders aren’t paying for idle resources
- Cost Avoidance: Protects IT budgets from cloud overprovisioning, overspending, and misspending
- More Efficient Use of Cloud Resources: Improves utilization by allocating cloud resources more effectively, ensuring optimal performance and scalability
Use Cases for Instance Pausing
Putting your cloud services into hibernation mode is especially helpful for companies that have known periods of inactivity or experience predictable periods of low resource utilization – for instance at night or during a low season, or where capacity is no longer needed. Other cases might include orphaned instances:
- Storage never used
- Databases never populated
- Load balancers never given traffic to manage
- Static IP addresses provisioned but never assigned
- Data just taking up space and generating costs – for example data backups where retention is no longer required
Instance Pausing: A Simple Concept that’s Difficult to Manage
But while the concept is simple, taking advantage of this IaaS feature can be prohibitively complex.
Studies show that on average companies maintain multi-cloud environments with services from 2-3 different cloud service providers (CSPs), and complexity multiplies with each additional CSP. A lack of standardization is the root of the issue. Each CSP charges for their services differently with a variety of ways to credit customers when they shut down their unused resources. To garner the most savings, IT teams must also be armed with the right information.
IT engineers must know:
- When to use pausing features, based on invoice data, usage data, and cost optimization insights
- How much they will save, based on the unique pricing structure and credit equations provided by each CSP
- How to schedule service stops across multiple dashboards and CSP portals
This mental evaluation and implementation time can be resource intensive for IT teams already overburdened. This is where a FinOps solution purpose-built to effectively manage cloud services can deliver significant value.
Put Pausing in Motion with FinOps Solutions from Tangoe
Tangoe understands that making decisions around when to pause and deciphering pausing credits on the backend can be daunting. That’s why we make it simple from start to finish. We show you when to put your services on hold, reveal how much you’ll save from pausing your services, and streamline the scheduling process across different CSPs. This way you have one portal to manage and oversee your costs, savings, and instance pausing.
Why FinOps Solutions are Better Suited for IaaS Instance Pausing than Native Tools
- Integration allows IT teams to pause services across multiple CSPs simultaneously, streamlining manual processes and improving productivity
- Ability to leverage AI to test scenarios and see the total savings generated by pausing in complex, multi-cloud environments with more than one CSP
- Automation allows IT teams to make changes to their cloud services in an instant, which results in accelerated time to savings
Cloud Services Management: Tangoe’s Instance Pausing Features
Tangoe’s cloud expense management platform for IaaS allows clients to pause services across multiple CSPs simultaneously, guiding them with cost optimization intelligence and quantifiable savings insights. Our FinOps solutions and pausing features are compatible with major CSPs including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Our features temporarily suspend virtual machines (VMs) and associated resources, such as storage and networking, without deleting them. Here are some of the key functionalities:
AI-Powered Scenario Modeling Guides Your Pausing Strategy
Clients can test different scenarios across each CSP to see which pausing schedules yield the most savings. The drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to adjust the timeframe and see the resulting changes to your savings, including savings for each individual service or CSP.
Tangoe is uniquely positioned to help you compare approaches using AI intelligence to cut costs. This is helpful for mid-size and large organizations with various departments, global geographies, time zones, etc. Learn more about Tangoe’s AI cloud savings engine.
Advanced Analytics Boost Your Savings Intelligence
Every CSP charges you differently for their service and has their own way of crediting your account after pausing each instance. Tangoe’s platform uses advanced AI analytics to accommodate for this, performing all the complex calculations for our clients across every CSP service. All you have to do is run scenarios, see the savings generated, and pause your services using our auto-scheduler. See how Tangoe helped a global manufacturer save $668,000 in cloud costs.
Auto-Scheduler Simplifies Multi-Cloud Management
Automation allows clients to schedule instance pausing in advance and across multiple CSPs simultaneously based on their specific requirements. Using Tangoe’s API integration, clients select all instances and create the pausing schedule according to 15- or 30-minute blocks. This feature is valuable because of the amount of time it saves IT engineers – one platform handles complex calculations, reveals what-if scenarios, and implements changes across multiple CSPs.
More Advantages for Instance Pausing
- A Savings Tracker Shows You the Money: Once implemented, the savings tracker monitors and traces the dollars saved from instance pausing, showing you easy-to-understand data visualizations.
- VM Preservation Speeds Resumptions: When an instance is paused, Tangoe’s platform ensures that the virtual machine’s state is preserved, including the data stored in memory. When the instance is resumed, it can quickly restore its previous state, eliminating the need for time-consuming boot-up processes.
- Access Restrictions Enable Security: Tangoe allows clients to restrict what accounts their users have access to, which aids in security efforts and reduces manual errors.
- Information Accuracy Sharpens Your Calculations: Data ingestion occurs every 2 hours, ensuring information accuracy. All reports and tables are instantly updated.
- Flexible Reporting Filters the Data Just How You Need It: Capabilities and filters allow reports to be generated by month, year, CSP, etc. Popular filters include instance name, instance ID, instance type, geographical regions, cost center, and owner.
- Comprehensive Solutions from Start to Finish: From cloud expense management software and managed services to IaaS optimization assessments performed by professional cloud cost management consultants, Tangoe has everything you need to get cloud service management right.
Instance pausing features provide IaaS customers with the opportunity to optimize their cloud resource usage, reduce costs, and improve the overall efficiency of their service consumption and network operations. Ready to get started with the help of Tangoe?
Download our Tangoe One Cloud brochure and contact us today for a personalized product demonstration.
Read the Other Articles in this Series
Cloud Cost Management: Tangoe’s Advanced Approach to Budgeting and Chargebacks
FinOps & Zero Trust Security: How Tangoe Protects Your Financial Data
Cloud Services Management: Public, Private, or Hybrid, We Work with More of Your Providers
5 Reasons to Select Tangoe as Your Cloud Cost Management Solution