Utility computing shifts the traditional approach to sourcing IT infrastructure from purchasing physical hardware to renting consumption-based cloud resources on demand. This eliminates initial hardware investment and associated maintenance costs while making IT infrastructure more agile, affordable, and flexible.
In a managed, cloud-based system, the solutions vendor takes responsibility for operations beyond meter communications endpoints and application software. This allows utilities to reduce staff requirements and focus on other critical functions. Cloud-based utility management also makes data more secure by reducing the need for local storage and making it less vulnerable to natural disasters.
Identifying and eliminating over-provisioned or idle resources is an important step in cutting cloud costs. A rightsizing tool helps you analyze instance families and recommends change recommendations to rightsize cloud usage, reducing costs and optimizing performance. This tool also monitors unused assets and terminates them after a specified period, which helps you stick to your budget and eliminate costly surprise costs.
Cloud scalability makes it easier to respond to traffic spikes or seasonality without increasing the number of servers. Using autoscaling, which automatically adjusts server capacity to manage peak loads, can help reduce the cost of running applications. It can also free up time and manpower that would have been spent managing the increase in traffic or responding to a traffic spike.
Utilities can rely on the reliability and scalability of the cloud for mission-critical business applications such as billing, financial systems, CIS, and more. They can easily migrate them with automated, pre-built migration configurations that match current on-premises architecture design. Keeping up with security and compliance demands is easy too, since updates and upgrades are included in the base subscription. cloud utility management
