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Recognising and addressing opportunities to enhance product functionality to save costs

Bogdan Dumitru
Bogdan Dumitru

Jul 20, 2023

Businesses are seeking optimisation at this new scale while reviewing hasty initiatives to ensure secure and robust strategies as they move forward as they start to rethink and refurbish their cloud plans during the tech slowdown. FinOps and operationalizing cloud are the two main topics of discussion this year, as Forrester says in their latest report. While these services provide increased flexibility and scalability, managing cloud costs has become a significant challenge for many organizations.  

Why focus on product functionality improvements? 

Beyond enhancing user experience, improving product functionality can result in increased cost-effectiveness. According to a 2023 Flexera report, 76% of enterprises struggle with cloud spend management. Inefficient features and resource consumption can quickly ramp up costs. Identifying these issues and resolving them can help to deliver optimal product performance at reduced costs. 

Identifying areas for improvement 

According to Gartner's 2019 report, more than 20% of organizations identified cost optimization as a primary reason for cloud migration. However, cost overruns are a common issue, indicating a need to identify and address product functionality improvements. This not only enhances user experience but can significantly reduce cloud consumption and costs.

  • Monitor and analyze your cloud usage -According to a 2022 Gartner report, lack of visibility into cloud usage leads to 30% of cloud spend being wasted. Utilizing cloud monitoring tools allows you to track resource usage, identify trends, and discover areas where resources are excessively consumed.
  • Perform regular code audits - They help uncover performance bottlenecks, inefficient code segments, and outdated libraries that might consume unnecessary resources, as highlighted in their 2022 software development report.
  • Use load testing - Load testing is essential for simulating user behavior under various scenarios. These simulations can identify areas of your product's performance that can be optimized. 

Addressing the identified areas 

Once areas for improvement have been identified, the next step is to address them.

  • Optimize code and infrastructure - Refactoring inefficient code and optimizing cloud infrastructure can reduce cloud resource usage. McKinsey found that such optimizations can cut cloud costs by up to 40%.
  • Leverage caching - Caching, according to Amazon Web Services, can significantly reduce cloud resource consumption by decreasing recurrent computations or queries, leading to substantial cloud cost reduction.
  • Adopt a microservices architecture - Deloitte's article on cloud adoption trends indicates that microservices architectures can increase product scalability and reduce costs, by enabling precise scaling of necessary system components.
Continuous identification and addressing of product functionality improvements are key to maintaining a cost-effective product. As indicated by these studies and reports, enhancing product performance while simultaneously reducing costs is an achievable goal. Aligning these strategies with the correct user tiering, as discussed in our previous post , will provide an even more robust cost and resource optimization strategy.