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Don’t ignore these proven infrastructure monitoring best practices and cost optimization strategies for reducing IT spending across cloud, storage, and compute environments.
As an IT director or infrastructure manager, you’re probably familiar with pressure to reduce costs while both maintaining performance and enabling growth.
Like one of our clients once told us, “I’m supposed to do 10% more with 10% less. Every year… Forever.”
While tactical issues like cloud bills and storage upgrades demand attention, the real opportunities for cost optimization often lie in strategic decisions about how infrastructure is managed, monitored, and maintained.
For IT leaders, this isn’t just about costs – it’s about transforming infrastructure from a cost center into a strategic asset. Here are seven critical areas where organizations waste infrastructure spending, along with strategic approaches to optimization:
- Misallocation of High-Value Staff Resources
- Sub-Optimal Support and Maintenance Strategies
- Poor Resource Utilization Across Platforms
- Reactive Infrastructure Management
- Infrastructure Monitoring Tool Sprawl
- Ineffective Cloud Cost Management
- Siloed Infrastructure Visibility
1. Misallocation of High-Value Staff Resources
Your most valuable employees – senior architects and engineers – are likely spending significant time on manual reporting and firefighting instead of strategic initiatives.
This creates compounding waste: direct salary costs plus missed opportunities for innovation and optimization.
According to McKinsey, automation can reduce costs in infrastructure management by 30-60%. More importantly, our own 2024 survey found that excessive tactical work directly correlates with reduced team productivity and increased turnover risk. The impact extends beyond immediate costs, affecting your organization’s ability to innovate and compete effectively.
Do This Instead: Audit how your top technical talent spends their time. Calculate both the direct cost of manual efforts and the opportunity cost of delayed strategic projects. Use this analysis to build a business case for automation that enables your team to focus on higher-value work.
2. Sub-Optimal Support and Maintenance Strategies
Many organizations reflexively renew manufacturer warranties or replace hardware prematurely. Third-party maintenance providers typically charge 50% less while providing comparable service levels, yet many IT leaders overlook this option due to concerns about visibility and control.
The key is maintaining enterprise-grade monitoring capabilities independent of manufacturer tools. This enables aggressive cost optimization without compromising oversight or performance.
Modern infrastructure monitoring platforms can provide even better visibility than native vendor tools while enabling significant maintenance savings.
Do This Instead: Review your maintenance strategy holistically. Map your infrastructure assets against their warranty status and create a decision framework for evaluating manufacturer renewal against third-party support and replacement options. Consider both immediate cost savings and long-term strategic flexibility.
3. Poor Resource Utilization Across Platforms
Analysts estimate that organizations typically waste 25-40% of their infrastructure capacity through various forms of underutilization.
In hybrid environments, this waste multiplies across platforms and creates compounding inefficiencies in storage, compute, and cloud resources.
The challenge is particularly acute in hybrid environments where workloads span multiple platforms. Without proper infrastructure monitoring, resources become stranded or overprovisioned.
For example, one of our clients discovered nearly 2 PB of reclaimable space – representing millions in potential savings – simply by gaining better cross-platform visibility by using a tool like Visual One Intelligence.
Do This Instead: Implement comprehensive resource monitoring across your hybrid infrastructure. Focus particularly on opportunities for workload optimization and resource reallocation between platforms. Consider tools that provide unified visibility across your entire infrastructure landscape.
4. Reactive Infrastructure Management
Strategic infrastructure management requires proactive monitoring and planning.
Yet many organizations remain stuck in costly reactive cycles, creating a cascade of unnecessary expenses and risks. Unplanned outages typically cost $15,000-23,000 per minute and last 30 minutes to 3 hours – costs that directly impact your bottom line.
The true cost of reactive management extends far beyond immediate incident expenses. Emergency hardware purchases often come at premium prices, while rushed cloud migrations lead to architectural inefficiencies.
More concerning is the impact on team morale and effectiveness, as constant firefighting leads to staff burnout and increased turnover.
Do This Instead: Calculate the true cost of reactive management by analyzing your last three major incidents. Include direct costs, indirect costs, and long-term impacts in your analysis. Use this comprehensive view to justify investment in predictive infrastructure monitoring and automation that prevents issues before they occur.
5. Infrastructure Monitoring Tool Sprawl
As hybrid infrastructures grow more complex, many organizations accumulate overlapping tools for storage, cloud, and virtualization management.
This creates not just excessive licensing costs, but also significant operational overhead in training, maintenance, and integration management.
Consolidation, on the other hand, often improves visibility and control by eliminating data conflicts and providing a single source of truth for infrastructure performance.
Do This Instead: Conduct a tool rationalization assessment that maps current capabilities against business requirements. Consider platforms that provide unified infrastructure monitoring across hybrid environments. Focus on solutions that can scale with your organization’s growth while reducing operational complexity.
6. Ineffective Cloud Cost Management
Cloud infrastructure optimization has become so challenging that organizations now hire dedicated FinOps teams. The FinOps Foundation reports organizations routinely waste 30% or more of cloud spend through inadequate governance and poor resource management.
Common areas of cloud waste include:
- Unmonitored resource scaling
- Inefficient storage tiering
- Missed volume discount opportunities
- Poor workload placement decisions
- Limited cross-provider visibility
Do This Instead: Implement a comprehensive cloud cost optimization strategy that includes regular cost reviews and automated resource management. Focus on solutions that provide clear visibility into cloud spending patterns and enable proactive optimization decisions.
7. Siloed Infrastructure Visibility
When infrastructure teams can’t see across platforms, they struggle to make strategic decisions about workload placement, capacity planning, and resource optimization. This fragmented visibility leads to suboptimal architectural decisions and missed optimization opportunities that compound over time.
The impact of siloed visibility extends beyond direct costs. Teams waste time reconciling data between platforms, while opportunities for optimization go unnoticed. This challenge becomes particularly acute as organizations adopt more complex hybrid and multi-cloud architectures.
Do This Instead: Prioritize solutions that provide unified infrastructure monitoring across your hybrid environment. Look for platforms that enable data-driven decisions through comprehensive visibility and advanced analytics capabilities.
Infrastructure Cost Optimization Best Practices
Successful infrastructure cost optimization requires a balanced approach that considers both immediate savings and long-term strategic value. Start by implementing comprehensive infrastructure monitoring across all platforms. Then establish clear optimization KPIs that align with business objectives.
Regular optimization reviews should become part of your standard operating procedure. These reviews should examine not just current performance but also trends and patterns that might indicate future optimization opportunities.
Measuring Success in Infrastructure Cost Optimization
Success in infrastructure cost optimization isn’t just about reducing costs – it’s about improving the value infrastructure delivers to the business. Track infrastructure cost per user or revenue dollar to understand efficiency gains. Monitor resource utilization rates and performance metrics to ensure optimization efforts don’t compromise service quality.
Next Steps in Your Infrastructure Optimization Journey
Infrastructure cost optimization is an ongoing strategic initiative that requires sustained attention and regular refinement. Success depends on having clear visibility across hybrid environments and the tools to make data-driven decisions about resource allocation and optimization.
Start by addressing your most significant sources of waste while building the monitoring and management capabilities needed for long-term optimization. Focus on solutions that can scale with your organization’s growth while providing the insights needed to make strategic infrastructure decisions.
About Visual One Intelligence®
Visual One Intelligence® is an infrastructure tool with a unique approach—guaranteeing better & faster monitoring, observability, and FinOps insights by leveraging resource-level metrics across your hybrid infrastructure.
By consolidating independent data elements into unified metrics, Visual One’s platform correlates and interprets hybrid infrastructure data to illuminate cost-saving and operations-sustaining details that otherwise stay hidden.
These insights lead to fewer tickets, less downtime, lower costs, and more efficient architectures.
