Lower Cloud costs! Identify and remove “dead branches”

 

Lower Cloud Costs!     Identify and remove “dead branches”

A recent report from Flexera (end of 2022) indicates, for the 7th consecutive year, that optimizing the use of the Cloud remains the main concern of CIOs.    62% of French CIOs explain that the Cloud costs them more than what was budgeted. Which does not prevent them from anticipating a new growth in spending on these environments. And it is endless.   It should be noted that if we ignore managed services which vary greatly depending on the customer,  the main costs of the Cloud are directly linked to volume and processing:       ...A   poorly measured  cost : the impact of lack  of intelligibility           systems ​   According to Oracle’s 2022 Decision Dilemma study, which surveyed more than 14,000 IT professionals in 17 countries,  nearly eight in ten respondents (78%) believe they have more data from multiple sources than ever before to support their decisions. But 86% of respondents say this volume makes decision-making far too complicated.  These difficulties in making decisions have negative repercussions for 85% of those surveyed: stress peaks (36%), missed opportunities (33%), or unnecessary expenses (29%).    When we know that nearly 70% of what is stored in databases is not used ("Rethink Data Report" by Seagate, 2022), we see that there are considerable financial or organizational margins to be found.    And yet, relatively few companies are moving forward with real continuous optimization projects. Probably because the mechanics require having an ultra-fine introspection capacity for often sprawling systems. This is where we position ourselves:  {openAudit}  automates the detection of "dead branches" in complex systems, calculates the associated costs, and continuously replays its score to enable continuous progress.

Methodology

1- Start with data that is not useful    Around the databases of information systems, gravitate the audit databases which agglomerate (among other things) all the uses that are made of the data of a system.  And by opposition the data which are not the object of any use.  {openAudit}  identifies them continuously.

2- Identify sources of data that have no use   Starting from unused data, i.e. from these "informational dead ends",  {openAudit}  continuously identifies all the upstream "dead branches", automatically going back to the operational sources.  This is thanks to multi-technological data lineage.  These will be components that store the data (tables, files, dashboards).  They will also be all the code or ETL jobs that allow the data to be processed in the Information System.

3- Calculate the costs of “dead branches”   {openAudit}  automatically adds up the costs related to these "dead branches" by mapping the data lineage and some logs from the hyperscalers' audit databases.

Conclusion   Sobriety is a trendy term. For excellent reasons. It must apply to Cloud Information Systems that have become insatiable, with countless side effects.     With our  {openAudit} software, we are able  to identify "dead matter" in systems on a continuous basis.  This dead matter can be discarded so that the systems remain as simple and coherent as possible. And without regression. For example, one of our customers deleted over 500 datasets, representing thousands of tables, in less than a week. Without any feedback from users!    This trajectory will also make it possible to reduce energy consumption and GHGs .   Finally, an essential virtuous spiral.