How to Reduce IT Infrastructure Costs: Practices to Follow

Every business wants to cut expenses as much as possible. In the long run, it is hardly wise to lay off core employees or simplify the production process. Thus, when it comes to proactive saving up, IT infrastructure cost is normally put under healthy reduction.

Information technology or IT infrastructure essentially refers to the wide range of components required to operate and manage business IT environments. The list of components IT infrastructure consists of includes but is not limited by hardware and software assets, firewalls, wireless access point, etc.

These days, cloud IT infrastructure gains popularity due to its convenience. Cloud computing means that all servers, software, and networks are hosted in the cloud. Providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and DigitalOcean are ready to provide you with hardware, networking, and more.

Wisely managed IT infrastructure helps businesses increase profit by decreasing the spend. How? The answer is IT infrastructure optimization and in this article we are gonna de-veil the greatest tricks of its practical implementation.

Let’s discuss top measures and techniques aimed at the most cost and resource-effective utilization of IT infrastructure elements.

These days, cloud computing is the headliner of top-notch solutions aimed at making technology friendly to any data capacity span. An ultimate flexibility of the cloud IT infrastructure is achieved through elimination of the need to host its “heavy-metal” part in the physical location. Instead, all software and networks are stored in the cloud server which allows you to get precisely the amount of space you need to fulfill your demands, and not go an unnecessary extra mile. Thus, the cloud computing model makes it much easier to exercise control over the cost of IT infrastructure.

Another fact grounding popularity of cloud-based solutions is associated with their holistic stability. Cloud IT infrastructure is completely independent in terms of outside environment conditions (such as electricity supply), which ensures fail-safety of a company’s workflow.

Scalability of cloud IT infrastructure also makes it incredibly cost-effective. For example, if your app experiences a spike of users, the cloud will deal with it by increasing the space dynamically. Alongside, in case of shrinkage of the user flow, cloud application development platform can help you scale the capacity down and pay less.

Providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and DigitalOcean are ready to provide you with hardware, networking, and other components of a consistent IT infrastructure.

At Cleveroad, we work with AWS services. Amazon offers a bunch of solutions like Amazon EC2, Amazon SS3, and Amazon Aurora.

Although wasted costs constitute a substantial part of revenue, most IT companies tend to underestimate the impact of that factor. To this end, next in the line of valuable components is calculation and estimation of the company’s up-to-date needs.

Each IT infrastructure (traditional or cloud) requires deep and comprehensive knowledge of the run projects to be effective. Correct estimation of the project specifics enables further accurate prediction of its subsequent needs. This approach allows sticking to the basics of IT services while retreating from redundant pieces of software.

The next question that logically arises here is how does IT infrastructure reduction is translated into practice? In order to get a correct future scope of services, it’s wise to take the following steps:

• Consider the things disposition: what software is on the run, how much storage space is used, what equipment is utilized, etc.
• Estimate your actual relevant needs at the moment via every point
• Based on the previous calculations, predict your needs for a 6-month period according to your business strategy
• Reduce the amount and scale of assets to the minimum of IT infrastructure

For greater results, it is worth consulting with experts that can also help you reduce software development costs correlated with infrastructure prices. Professional engineers will analyze your business needs and calculate the span of ad hoc resources.

Talking about IT infrastructure and its leveraging, special attention should be paid to the hardware (sure, only in case you have a physical on-site storage). Physical hardware is a peculiarly demanding set of IT infrastructure, which requires constant monitoring. Precisely, it’s vital to run regular estimations of how much storage space is occupied by the assets, and how much is still available.

In case you’ve faced the need for additional space, before running for a full hardware refresh, make sure you adjust it to the precise needs of a newly implemented service or product. Maintenance of IT infrastructure is also critical as it prolongs your current hardware existence, thus sparing your financial resources!

This tip primarily has to do with cloud computing as this option implies receiving bills from the server provider. Despite paying the provider a flat rate, finance allocation still can be confusing. With a wide variety of utilized services, it’s perfectly easy to miss the moment when your hardware becomes packed with unnecessary assets.

To avoid wasted costs, it's vital to conduct a detailed IT infrastructure cost breakdown and then track the billing flow process via each specific compound. Follow the next recommendations to make the process effective:

• Set alerts to get notifications if you reach a pre-set financial threshold
• Adjust your IT infrastructure cost model to the up-to-date needs of your projects
• Check billing and usage reports on a regular base
• Use provider’s cost management tools to make effective IT infrastructure costs estimates

For example, AWS offers to monitor usage and expense with AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Budgets.

AWS offers to monitor usage and expense with AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Budgets.

Talking about what is IT infrastructure, hardware is among its most substantial elements in terms of cost formation. But wouldn’t it be amazing if companies could just focus on the development without the need to worry about servers?

Many asked that question. Luckily, it hasn’t been left unanswered, and serverless computing entered the stage of cutting-edge IT development. A cloud computing model presupposes such an organization of cloud IT infrastructure where the responsibility for cloud maintenance is held by the cloud provider. With serverless IT infrastructures you are guaranteed to only use a truly necessary amount of cloud storage as the hardware resources are allocated on demand. Serverless computing is strongly associated with the concept of feature as a service.

Below you’ll find a list of top practical tools for utilizing serverless computing.

Most cloud providers offer serverless computing, for example Amazon Lambda, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions.

Since no IT infrastructure of a company just goes by itself but is managed by relevant members of staff, the human factor is critical for the purposes of IT infrastructure optimization.

To that end, have you already heard of DevOps? Today, by common consent of the IT realm, DevOps is considered to be the most progressive approach to the labor force’s inner organization. The zest of the DevOps’s philosophy is that it blurs the lines between separate job roles, and thus dissolves the boundaries between development and other related operations. Engaging DevOps for the IT infrastructure support means that no project-related data is omitted but is instead constantly exchanged between all the parties involved.

In a DevOps environment no job performer is isolated: developer works hand-in-hand with a system administrator, and a marketing specialist, and a designer, and so on. Each team member is part of the ship, part of the crew.

Such non-stop cross-departmental cooperation boosts awareness of what components are available, what are still necessary to gain, and what can be reduced to increase the end profit.

There are two main roads you can take to hire a qualified DevOps engineers’ team: going for in-house developers or cooperating with a reliable vendor providing outsourced DevOps services.

Each option has its own pros and cons. For example, an in-house team makes the communication easier but requires a bunch of additional expenses (rent, hardware, software, vacations, and more). On the other hand, outsourcing provides you with experienced developers and well-adjusted IT infrastructure at a lower cost. That’s why hiring a software development company via outsource is another great answer to the “how to reduce IT infrastructure costs“ question.

Outsource app development cost will vary depending on the region and the expertise level of software engineers. Outsource app development cost. For example, a DevOps engineer from North America can cost you at least $192,000 yearly (based on 40 working hours per week). Considering that you need several specialists, it costs a fortune. On the contrary, DevOps specialists from Eastern Europe require drastically less $48,000 yearly.

Recently, there was a chance to observe the proliferation of temporary hiring options, commonly referred to as on-demand. In contrast to the scenario where your e-business is supported by a permanent team of dedicated specialists 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, the on-demand option is only there for you for a limited amount of time. Or, to be more precise, it is there for you just as long as you need it to accomplish a comparatively simple and straight-fourward task.

The most important thing is that you can take advantage of the on-demand hiring might to add power to your infrastructure components in the most resource-efficient manner. Let’s look at the two examples of wide-spread on-demand hiring options.

Cleveroad is a software development company headquartered in North Europe, Estonia. For more than 10 years we’ve been managing and maintaining cloud IT infrastructure for our customers.

Our DevOps engineers can help you:

• Create, adjust, support, and optimize integration and code delivery tools (Jenkins, Bamboo)
• Interact with Version Control Systems (Gitlab, Github, Bitbucket)
• Automate processes by creating scripts or using specific technologies like Ansible
• Administrate cloud platforms (AWS)
• Optimize a cloud IT infrastructure
• Integrate a required technology into a company’s IT processes