Here we are, with an economic downturn looming globally and some countries facing a recession. For many execs and tech decision-makers in the financial services industry, it’s not the first go-round. During the recession of 2008, they experienced firsthand how fast money and assets can vanish.
Fortunately, there now are trusted steps financial institutions can take to prepare for tough economic times and even to emerge stronger.
Being proactive — and sometimes that means pulling back — can make all the difference. Below, we outline some proactive steps for achieving cost efficiency and maintaining performant database environments amid a turbulent economy:
1. Scale down
The assumption tends to be that scaling is all about growth. Growth is good, so scaling means growth, right? Not when your institution’s key indicators show that demand is decreasing.
Relatedly, that assumption is often applied to cloud-based managed services. Financial institutions appreciate the elasticity of the cloud but most often focus primarily on using it to scale up. Figuring out how to match fluctuations in both directions, however, can significantly reduce hosting costs. Institutions can cut up to one-third of their costs simply by “rightsizing” to appropriately match demand.
Here are a few ways you can scale down and save:
- Audit your systems: Auditing your system for unused servers and eliminating those servers can reduce your cloud spend. If needed, you can spin up a backup.
- Consolidate workloads: In the past, you might have wanted to split out additional replicas or cluster nodes to process specific types of workloads, such as those related to reporting. But you might not need those workloads as demand decreases. You can consolidate them and add them back later if needed.
- Shrink your footprint: If you consolidate and reduce workloads, moving to smaller instances can help you decrease costs. In addition, hoarding digital data is expensive. Cutting back on the amount of data you store can lead to big savings.
- Maximize the value of existing tools, systems, and services: Take an inventory of what you have, and make sure you’re getting the most out of your resources. Deactivate or eliminate elements you’re not using.
- Consider alternative tools, systems, and services: Many cloud providers offer long-term storage, serverless options, or component options for specific needs, with vastly different pricing models. Evaluating whether your institution’s applications are set up optimally can help you identify where to cut costs. For example, if you have an application that consumes a lot of resources, serverless may not be the cheapest option.
2. Tune and optimize to improve performance
Even if you consider your database platform modern, simple database tuning and optimization can speed up your processes significantly. By optimizing your code and fine-tuning your database infrastructure, you can enhance the flexibility and performance of your database environment, especially if you’re using cloud resources.
Although it may take a few days or weeks, tuning and optimizing your environment eases your workload and can substantially decrease your overall costs. With proper database management, it’s possible to cut your bills in half.
3. Cross-train
Investing in your employees is always a good idea, but expanding their skill sets can also reduce costs. For example, involving DBAs in development or system administration duties helps them become more well-rounded as they experience the challenges and processes that other groups face.
In addition, training employees to step into site reliability engineering (SRE) roles helps delay costs and build teams that better understand the touchpoints between business units of a financial institution.
Learn a lot more about managing costs in an economic downturn
We’ve covered three of the steps, but that’s only the beginning. You’ll learn much more about managing costs while maintaining performant databases when you read Rethinking the Cost and Performance of Database Management in the Financial Industry.
The eBook covers the following:
- Ways to streamline and “rightsize” operations to better meet demand
- Decisions about planned or ongoing initiatives, like whether to migrate to the cloud or accelerate a migration
- Other key considerations that directly impact ROI
